15 Shostakovich Quartets

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote 15 string quartets, all now recorded by the Borodin String Quartet on six Angel/EMI compact discs. They will be performed by the celebrated Soviet ensemble at Ambassador Auditorium beginning Wednesday, an event without precedent in this country outside New York, where Britain’s Fitzwilliam Quartet, (also the first to record the 15, for the Decca/L’Oiseau-Lyre label) presented the cycle several seasons ago.

Shostakovich did not begin writing quartets until 1935, by which time he was already a scarred veteran of run-ins with Soviet artistic authority.

So he turned inward, as composers wrestling with the sometimes dubious rewards of high visibility frequently do--to the string quartet. He returned to that most personal medium with increasing frequency until 1974, when in the last months of his life he produced his agonized and agonizing 15th Quartet, 40 minutes of lamentation, each of its six movements (all slow) in the same key of E-flat minor: a vast elegy that has had very few performances in the West--or in the Soviet Union, for that matter.

The quality of the Shostakovich 15 is variable. Yet, among those 15, better than half--the Second, Third, Fifth, Seventh and the last four--are candidates for inclusion among the medium’s major 20th-Century statements, given sufficiency of exposure by interpreters as sensitive as the Borodin Quartet.

Whatever form he employs, Shostakovich is never far from either mocking or lamenting. But in the quartets he does both not only more quietly, but more starkly. Compared to the Fifth through Eighth symphonies (1937-1943), the roughly contemporaneous first three quartets are tight-knit and vastly more subtle--a cliche description of all chamber music, perhaps, but unavoidable here.

The sardonic marches of the symphonies turn, in the Second and Third quartets, into spastic, grotesque (and not at all charmless) marionette-like dances. The acid humor, which had already made itself felt in his 1930s operas and incidental scores, is here softened and used to serve as prelude to deeper thoughts.

Beethoven’s quartets tend to be divided into three distinct stylistic periods, Shostakovich’s into two--with constant stylistic vacillations and cross-references among the first 11, while the final four stand as a loosely-unified entity with shared characteristics not heard elsewhere in the canon.

The composer could hardly have written this last-days music with an audience in mind. It is the work of a terminally withdrawn man, and symbol and companion of that withdrawal--deep, dark, unconsolable, thoroughly magnificent.

The experience of listening to the recently released traversal of the 15 by the Borodin String Quartet proved alternately (sometimes simultaneously) uplifting, exhausting and exasperating. Not all of this material is slated for immortality, and little of it is easy listening.

What became clear in the lengthy listening process, however, was that the composer’s overall achievement is immense--as is the achievement of the Borodin String Quartet. The thinking-as-with-a-single-mind ideal of chamber music is achieved by the performers with a consistency, a profundity of feeling and beauty of ensemble tone that should rank these among the major chamber music recordings of the last half-century.

Yet the Borodin’s playing is not typically Russian-luscious. While their ensemble is rock-solid, the players disdain the fat tone and all-purpose, nonstop vibrato as consistently as they disdain grandstanding and sentimentality. Their approach to Shostakovich is less aggressive and outgoing than that of their Western counterparts--and truer to the music.

On these Angel/EMI compact discs, recorded (with consistently superb sonics) between 1979 and 1986, the 15 quartets are combined as follows: Nos. 1, 9, 12 (49266); 2, 3 (49267); 4, 6, 11 (49268); 7, 8 and the Quintet, with pianist Sviatoslav Richter (47507); 10, 13, 14 (49269); 5, 15 (49270).