Jerusalem Quartet: Shostakovich I

For decades, the Israeli Jerusalem Quartet has been inspiring with its Shostakovich interpretations – now it is embarking on a complete performance: all fifteen quartets at Beethovenfest Bonn and at the Cologne Philharmonie. It opens with the lyrical and cheerful First Quartet from 1938. After the Fifth, which Shostakovich only dared to publish after Stalin’s death, the ensemble proceeds to two fractured late works from 1966 and 1968. Shostakovich wrote his Eleventh Quartet in memory of a departed musician friend; it is torn and enigmatic in its fragmented setting. In the Quartet No. 12, Shostakovich disregards Soviet cultural-political barriers, writing a bold, atonal, complex twelve-tone work.