Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 13 in B flat minor, Op. 138

With Vol.V the Mandelring Quartet completes the fifteen string quartets of Shostakovich. Highly praised in the press as one of the outstanding complete editions of our time, the last volume presents the Quartets Nos. 11, 13 and 15.

The Eleventh Quartet received its premiere in the former Leningrad at the preliminary celebrations of the composer's 60th birthday. During the very same night, the composer suffered a serious heart attack which changed his life and way of thinking. This 1966 quartet was dedicated to the late violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, an ensemble with which the composer was intimately acquainted, appears as a multi-movement suite in which character pieces such as the "Etude" and the "Humoresque" turn up - with a grim, cynical humour, of course.The 13th Quartet composed in 1970 is dedicated to the violist of the Beethoven Quartet and is a portrait, in a single monumental movement, of this instrument that Shostakovich loved so much. In the final, 15th Quartet (1974), the composer finally seizes upon a radical formal solution: six Adagio movements come together to form a large work of mourning which bears no more dedication… With Shostakovich's fifteen string quartets the Mandelring Quartet presents a quartet cycle, which in its entirety probably represents the most important corpus of string quartets of the 20th century.

"This is uncanny playing and it has been recorded with uncanny clarity and presence by Audite's engineers… the Shostakovich cycle of choice." International Record Review

To coincide with the 30th anniversary of Gidon Kremer’s Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival in Austria, ECM releases a 5-CD box set of recordings from 1981-2008. Out-of-print material reappears here, joined by never-before-released recordings of Richard Strauss (conducted by Simon Rattle) and Messiaen.

Edition Lockenhaus is the first New Series release in ECM’s Old & New Masters range, produced as specially-priced limited edition, with 60-page booklet. It includes recordings from 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, and 1986 – previously issued as Edition Lockenhaus Volumes 1/2 and 4/5 (ECM 1304/05 and 1347/48). These have been long unavailable on CD and LP, and are eagerly sought-after by Kremer aficionados. Lockenhaus has been, above all, a young musicians’ festival and some of the very greatest have appeared there, alongside Gidon Kremer, early in their careers – including players strongly associated with ECM: Kim Kashkashian, Thomas Zehetmair, Thomas Demenga, Robert Levin, Heinz Holliger and more.

The edition opens with unreleased recordings – from 2001 and 2008 – with Sir Simon Rattle and Roman Kofman conducting Kremerata Baltica in revelatory performances of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Olivier Messiaen’s Trois petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine. The committed interpretations convey the spirit of Lockenhaus. (Kremer himself has described Rattle’s conducting of Richard Strauss’s music as “unforgettable”).

Discs two to five focus on music by César Franck, André Caplet, Francis Poulenc, Leos Janácek, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and Erwin Schulhoff.