Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 122

This is the third instalment in the Pacifica Quartet’s highly anticipated, and already highly acclaimed four-volume CD survey of the complete Shostakovich string quartets: The Soviet Experience: String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich and his Contemporaries.

It is the first Shostakovich quartet cycle to include works by other important composers of the Soviet era, adding variety and perspective to the listening experience.

This superbly performed series of audiophile recordings, produced and engineered by multiple Grammy Award winner Judith Sherman, will appeal to everyone interested in great Russian music of the 20th century.

The Pacifica’s previous instalment, The Soviet Experience Volume II, received an extraordinary reception from critics. “The playing is nothing short of phenomenal, bringing new dimensions of interpretative depth and a subtle fusion of intensity and clarity. . . . When the series is complete, it looks set to be the one to own” (The Telegraph).

A judicious coupling of Shostakovich recordings by the Jerusalem Quartet who have won BBC Music Magazine Awards no less than three times.

Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets provide a very personal response to the events that were taking place in the Soviet Union during his lifetime, and are among his most popular works.

The three quartets heard here are not linked, but they are similar in some respects, all beginning with an understated intimacy, their simple ideas becoming tense and turbulent, eventually reaching some kind of uneasy calm.

The haunting Quartet No. 4 was composed in 1949, when Soviet Jewish culture was under real threat. Shostakovich’s blatant use of Jewish motifs in the bittersweet fourth movement would not have pleased the Soviet authorities at the time so it was not performed until 1953, after Stalin’s death.

The string quartets 11 to 14 are all dedicated to members of the Beethoven String Quartet, who gave the first performances of nearly all the quartets. The cryptic but elegiac Quartet No.11, composed in 1966, marks the start of Shostavich’s late period. Quartet No.14 was written two years before Shostakovich’s death in 1975, its close a lingering farewell.

The Hagen Quartet, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, is one of the most highly

respected string quartets in the world. They are noted for the precision of their ensemble playing and the colour and nuance they bring to performance, all of which help them to unearth deeper emotions beneath the surface. This recording was made in 1993.

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