Shostakovich: String Quartets Vol.5 / Mandelring Q

Mandelring Quartett

Dmitri Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 122 / String Quartet No. 13 in B flat minor, Op. 138 / String Quartet No. 15 in E flat minor, Op. 144

With Vol. V the Mandelring Quartet has accomplished its complete edition of the fifteen string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich. Highly praised in the trade press as one of the outstanding complete editions of our time the last volume presents the Quartets Nos. 11, 13 and 15. The musical language of these late chamber works becomes more jagged, the colours more pale and the tone more elegiac.
The Eleventh String Quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich received its premiere in the former Leningrad at the preliminary celebrations of the composer’s sixtieth birthday. During the very same night, the composer suffered a serious heart attack which changed his life and way of thinking. While his daily life was determined by stays in hospital and at health resorts, Shostakovich occupied himself very frequently with death in his late works. And the three works recorded here, too, are either commemorative works written for colleagues or requiem-compositions in view of the composer’s own end.
Quartet No. 11 (1966), 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 twentieth century.

Price: $24.98