A programme entitled Life, Letters and Friendship brought together the renowned Carducci Quartet and celebrated actor Anton Lesser. Together, they shaped a fascinating traversal of string quartet movements by Dmitri Shostakovich, a chronological survey heard within the context of historical sources and a selection of letters to the composer’s friend and literary critic Isaac Glikman with whom he corresponded for over four decades. Curated by the Carducci’s cellist Emma Denton, words and music unveiled the composer’s troubled relationship within a tyrannical political regime, its censorship and authoritarian power bringing intolerable stresses to a man still regarded as the most inscrutable of Russian composers.
Half a dozen letters read by Lesser pointed up the close relationship between Shostakovich and Glikman and underlined the composer’s torment about joining the Communist Party. Famously derided for “Muddle instead of Music” and writing scores that were a “bourgeois perversion”, a telephone call from Stalin in 1949 gave him permission to visit the United States and rescinded the ban on his music. For a composer both revered and reviled, Shostakovich walked a political tightrope, never really knowing if his packed suitcase would stay in his apartment. The sheer danger of life in the Soviet Union goes part of the way to explaining why Shostakovich himself saved none of Glikman's side of the correspondence.
But the letters to Glikman are shot through with warmth and humour and variously recommend a special brand of vodka, the joy of his second marriage and an increasing mention of his deteriorating health. After a bad fall in 1967, one letter almost proudly asserted “Target achieved so far: 75% (right leg broken, left leg broken, right hand defective). All I need to do now is wreck the left hand and then 100% of my extremities will be out of order.” Curiously, no reference to his passion for football was included in any letters, nor, when introducing the Eighth Quartet, was his musical monogram DSCH alluded to, or the horrors of Dresden and how the city’s devastation supposedly worked its way into the music.
One could have no quibbles, however, with the remarkably assured playing of the Carducci Quartet. As one of the leading interpreters of Shostakovich, acclaimed for their seven-hour quartet marathon in 2015, the players gave flawless performances of individual movements drawn from nine of the composer’s fifteen string quartets. Their shared sense of identity and involvement with the music was unmistakable, as too their collective response to the composer’s brooding, hysteria and impish wit. This last was evident in the alternately relaxed and skittish manner of the First Quartet, a pirouetting violin highlighted the playfulness of the Second and jazzy rhythms and 12-note serialism brought nose-thumbing to the Thirteenth.
Much in evidence too was how the Carducci Quartet underlined the austere beauty of these works, their interior world charted in the Fourth Quartet, numbed emotions and fury within the Eighth and nervous energy occupying the Second. The intimacy of the Tenth drew from the Carducci’s the quietest of pianissimos and the closing passage of the elegiac Fifteenth caught the ear with its haunting final paragraph. Not since the late quartets of Beethoven has the medium been a vehicle for such personal introspection. While only a partial exploration, this recital clarified just why Shostakovich’s quartets stand as one of the great monuments of 20th-century music, works once viewed by his compatriot Sofia Gubaidulina as the “epitome of the tragedy and terror of our times.”
