Shostakovich
String Quartets Nos 2, 7 & 10
Jerusalem Quartet
BIS BIS-2654 75:20 mins
Clip: Shostakovich – String Quartet No. 10 II. Allegretto furioso
This recording is an absolute winner. As in its previous explorations of Shostakovich, primarily on the Harmonia Mundi label, the Jerusalem Quartet provides consummately brilliant playing throughout, combining amazing technical finesse with overwhelming musical insight. The Jerusalems invest every phrase with an exquisite range of nuances, and individual voices are both seamlessly blended and subtly calibrated to achieve a perfect balance of texture. In each performance, the players take us through a vast gamut of emotions, from loneliness and tender reflection to almost unbearable levels of neurosis and unbridled fury. Yet the flawless control that is exhibited throughout never sounds cold or calculating, and even on repeated listening, the playing yields a compelling spontaneity that is normally only experienced live.
The Second Quartet is delivered here with fiercely Beethovenian dynamism. A patient build-up of tension characterises the opening passage of the first movement, the performers slightly holding back the dynamic levels to ensure that the frenzied climax in the development has maximum impact. In stark contrast, time seems to stand still in the ensuing movement. Alexander Pavlovsky simply takes your breath away with his mesmerising projection of the melismatic first violin writing in the Recitative, and the tricky transition to the more lyrical central Romance is handled with great sensitivity. The clouds darken considerably in the shadowy Waltz movement which is invested with a deep sense of unease that is transformed into brutal aggression in the middle part.
Despite Shostakovich’s amazingly resourceful and imaginative manipulation of variation form in the Finale, I have rarely been convinced that the movement entirely hangs together – a result perhaps of the composer’s frequent and almost schizophrenic changes of tempo. But I experienced no such qualms in the present performance which takes the music by the scruff of its neck. Exploiting every twist and turn in the musical narrative with a seemingly infinite variety of textures and dynamics serves to make the full-blooded A minor chords at the end of the work sound all the more tragic and inconsolable.
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After the powerful conclusion to the Second Quartet, the Jerusalems adopt a much more subdued, even repressed interpretative pose for the epigrammatic Seventh Quartet, a work dedicated to the memory of the composer’s first wife. There are few passages in Shostakovich’s quartet output that are more chilling than the disembodied sounds of the second movement Lento. It’s performed here with such an eerie stillness that I can almost guarantee listeners will be stunned when almost without warning, the Jerusalems allow all hell to break loose in the unhinged fugal Allegro.
Similarly disturbing juxtapositions of mood characterise the first two movements of the Tenth Quartet. Foreboding underpins the obsessive and claustrophobic Allegretto that here rarely rises above a soft and spookily withdrawn level. Then uncontained anger breaks out in the Allegretto furioso where the Jerusalems exert absolute control when playing a dissonant, percussive series of chords whose cumulative impact is intensified by the time we arrive at the very end. Erik Levi
