Classical Music | Music for Quartet

Dmitry Shostakovich

String Quartet no. 1, op. 49  Play

Borodin String Quartet Quartet

Recorded on 01/01/1978, uploaded on 09/20/2013

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

While Dmitri Shostakovich composed as many string quartets as he did symphonies, his first quartet did not appear until 1938, after he already had five symphonies under his belt. The late 1930s were a particularly troublesome time for the composer. Two years prior to composing the First String Quartet, his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, despite its initial success, resulted in his first official denunciation and become the impetus for Stalin’s frequent vitriolic condemnations. It was also the year the Great Terror began, in which many of the composer’s friends and relatives were either imprisoned or killed. Already facing Stalin’s ire, Shostakovich planned to return to official favor with the premiere of his conservative Fifth Symphony in 1937. He succeeded, with the symphony receiving a half-hour long ovation at its premiere.

With his return to good standing with his Soviet overlords, Shostakovich perhaps felt safe to venture into the string quartet, a genre that inherently allows for greater personal expression and experimentation than the symphony. Shostakovich initially began the First String Quartet in 1938 as an exercise, but soon became enthralled with the project and completed it in about six weeks. Its character is strikingly different from the Fifth Symphony and is also particularly removed from the mood of his fourteen later essays for the ensemble. Overall, it has a bright and sunny disposition, contrasted only by the minor key middle movements. Cast in a more or less regular four-movement design, it is however a brief work, hardly lasting even a quarter of an hour. The quartet premiered in Leningrad on October 10, 1938 and in Moscow on November 16 of the same year. This latter concert, by the Beethoven Quartet, began a lifelong friendship between Shostakovich and the ensemble.      Joseph DuBose

recorded in Moscow, 1978 (studio recordings)

courtesy of YouTube