Hyperion Records | Shostakovich: String Quartets Nos. 2 & 3

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CDA67153

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Recording details: April 1999
St Petersburg Recording Studio, Russia
Produced by Alexander Gerutsky
Engineered by Gerhard Tses
Release date: August 1999
Total duration: 66 minutes 33 seconds

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'One of the finest chamber recordings of any genre I've heard all year and one that catches the idiom of the music in near-definitive terms. Superbly played and engineered, it's a magnificent beginning to what promises to be a must-hear series' (The Independent on Sunday)

'It is high time that a younger generation of Russian string players should tackle this key oeuvre of 20th-century chamber music, and in the St Petersburg Quartet we surely have the natural successors to the Borodin's crown. These virtuosic and sumptuous-toned accounts of the A and F major quartets easily rival the quasi-orchestral sonority the older quartet brought to this music and they are no less adept at mining the profound melancholy that pervades Shostakovich's great, lamenting slow movements and the mordant, sardonic wit of his parodistic waltzes and scherzos. A dazzling debut' (The Sunday Times)

'Deserves an emphatic recommendation and makes one impatient for the ensemble's next Shostakovich disc' (BBC Music Magazine)

'An edge-of-the-seat experience as this Russian quartet hurls itself headlong into the scores' (BBC Music Magazine)

'These readings warrant strong commendation ... Excellent performances.' (Classic CD)

‘Extraordinary intensity and depth’ (Los Angeles Times)

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

String Quartets Nos. 2 & 3

St Petersburg Quartet

		String Quartet No 2 in A major, Op 68
1		Movement 1: Overture [8'44]
2		Movement 2: Recitative and Romance [8'55]
3		Movement 3: Waltz [6'10]
4		Movement 4: Theme and Variations [10'59]
		String Quartet No 3 in F major, Op 73
5		Movement 1: Allegretto [6'58]
6		Movement 2: Moderato con moto [4'52]
7		Movement 3: Allegro non troppo [3'52]
8		Movement 4: Adagio [5'25]
9		Movement 5: Moderato [10'38]

This is the first of what will be the entire set of Shostakovich Quartets recorded by the St Petersburg String Quartet on Hyperion. Shostakovich wrote his first string quartet in 1938, with No 2 following six years later in 1944 (three weeks after the completion of his Piano Trio). The Piano Trio and String Quartet No 2 appear, emotionally, to be the obverse of the same coin and although the Quartet contains structural elements such as found in the Piano Trio, it stands entirely on its own as a wholly convincing work of art.

Having achieved a unique mastery of quartet-writing in No 2, by 1946 Shostakovich tackled the medium again. Also by this time, he had successfully tackled a formal challenge which had long fascinated Beethoven - the joining-together of movements of different character, yet done in such a way as to make their continuation both seamless and inevitable. Shostakovich had done this in the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, as well as in the Piano Quintet and Piano Trio, but had not thus far attempted it in quartet writing. The Quartet No 3, which is in some respects superficially akin to the Ninth Symphony, revealed new facets of this great composer's compositional mastery, and plumbed considerable depths for Shostakovich than before in this medium.