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Details
Kings Place
90 York Way
Kings Cross
London
N1 9AG
England
Programme
Dmitry Shostakovich – String Quartet no.10 in A flat major, Op.118
Dmitry Shostakovich – String Quartet no.15 in E flat minor, Op.144
Performers
Brodsky Quartet
Other concerts in this Series (+)
Programme Note
Paul Cassidy, viola, writes: ‘Quartet No. 10 always strikes me as a little oasis. Whilst its outer movements remain eerily subdued, drained of hope and with little to prove, they do nonetheless serve to highlight two of the most striking movements in the whole set. The ‘Furioso’ second, with its 347 bars of unrelenting venom is arguably the most bitter of his tirades. This is followed by a particularly beautiful Passacaglia whose form is a bit of a Shostakovich trademark […] And so we come to Quartet No. 15. Frankly, what to say? This is the most intimate and profound commentary on the eternal question of life and death. The music is stripped back to its bare bones, perpetually alone. Only for one brief moment of its heavenly length do the four players collectively exist. The work is full of emotion, beauty, love, tragedy, humour – it’s all there, but expressed existentially by a mind which appears to be straddling that nebulous line between reality and the unknown.’
The concert is preceded by a lecture by Marina Frolova-Walker exploring the life and times of Shostakovich and discussing what Shostakovich able to do in his quartets that he couldn’t do equally well in other genres and whether the quartets give us some kind of privileged access to the inner life of the composer. (4pm St Pancras Room)
For future LCMS Sunday concerts, please visit The London Chamber Music Society
