The final volume in a distinguished quartet cycle by one of the most exciting Italian ensembles of the present day.
Founded in 2011, Quartetto Noûs have been playing Shostakovich since their earliest concerts together, and their performances, both in concert and on record, bear the mark of both deep study and complete identification with the scores. These are risk-taking, thoroughly embedded performances, as many critics have recognised, which live up to the edgy intensity of the music itself.
The Quartetto Noûs have saved up Shostakovich’s first and final essays in the quartet genre until last. The juxtaposition is arresting, though it should be remembered that the First Quartet is not ‘early’ Shostakovich and does not share the madcap energy or prodigious brilliance of works from the composer’s teens such as the First Symphony. Indeed the smoothly wrought opening of the First Quartet, from 1938, reflects its Op.49 designation within his catalogue: this is a composer who has seen and suffered much and grasped how to translate experience into sound within tightly constructed forms.
Within the First Quartet’s four-movement, 15-minute span, there is all the same no shortage of his mordant wit and his poker face. Such qualities still define the profile of the last three quartets, from the very end of the composer’s life. By this point his health was poor and his movement restricted.
The economy of means is as remarkable as the huge emotional terrain covered by these works. The instrumental scream at the end of the 13th Quartet is as bleak and terrifying as anything in 20th-century music.
The 14th is a final and supreme example of Shostakovich the black humorist in the tradition of Mussorgsky, while the 15th belies its form of six slow movements with the sharpest of pens; he retained a genius for telling a story and crafting a melody even when using fewer notes than ever.
Previous instalments of this Shostakovich cycle by Quartetto Noûs have attracted glowing praise from international critics:
‘This recording by the Quartetto Noûs is an exceptionally good one’
(MusicWeb International)
‘A cycle well worth following…a sound-palette more usually applied to Tchaikovsky pays dividends in bringing rich and personable characterisation’
(The Strad)
- This new 2-CD set is the last instalment of the complete Shostakovich String Quartets by the Italian Quartetto Noûs, featuring the quartets numbers 1, 13, 14 and 15.
- Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) is without doubt one of the most famous and influential composers of 20th century Russia. He lived in a time of Soviet repression and, though outwardly a loyal communist, he resented the restrictions imposed by the regime on his creativity. This led to a fascinating duality between conformism and the expression of his most innermost feelings, fears and anger.
- Shostakovich’s 15 String Quartets form an impressive body which follows the development of his style throughout his life. They are the testimony of a tortured soul struggling to remain true to himself, expressed in anguish and bleakness, but also in serenity and bliss.
- Quartetto Noûs, formed in 2011, has established itself in a short time as one of the most interesting chamber music ensembles of its generation. Its immersive performances are the result of a professional training where the Italian tradition and the most influential European schools are combined. The quartet studied with the Quartetto di Cremona, with Rainer Schmidt (Hagen Quartet), with Günter Pichler (Alban Berg Quartet) and with Heime Müller (Artemis Quartet).
- The first volume of the Shostakovich Quartets by Quartetto Noûs for Brilliant Classics was hailed enthusiastically by the press. Musicweb writes:” This is one of the best as it left me in awe of the breadth as well as the intensity of Shostakovich’s genius, recording of the month”.
