A decade ago, marking 40 years since the composer’s death, the Carducci Quartet played Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets in a remarkable day-long marathon. This year is the 50th anniversary, but how do you follow that? For the Carduccis, the answer was to look outwards: programming the Shostakovich quartets they’ve played so often across five concerts alongside works by the Russian composer’s students and sharing their platform with newer, up-and-coming groups.
The Carduccis opened this penultimate concert with Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 4, which runs from spare, plaintive folksiness to full-throttle pseudo-klezmer. The former showcased the Carduccis’ exquisitely blended tone. The latter, the drama that can be generated from rustic pizzicatos, the hard catch of bow hair on string, the intensity of a cello melody eked out of a stratospheric thumb position. But there was also a hint of business as usual – the first violin always dominant, energy always injected by the cello, the overall sound always mellow.
No such danger with the Elmore Quartet, which played Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 13 with the ferocity of musicians determined to make an impact. Vibrato was banished; the vibrant array of tone colours came from bow control alone. The results were sometimes unearthly, sometimes brutal – the first violin’s interjections at one point picked off the string in nasty little wedges and Shostakovich’s wooden knocks (bow against instrument) terrifying. The audience fell absolutely silent.
After the interval, the Elmores returned with Elena Firsova’s String Quartet No 4 “Amoroso”, with the composer present. The violins fired pizzicatos like gunshots and contrapuntal lines were served searing. But there were also moments of sudden beauty, poised amid the tumult.
No Shostakovich quartet is better known than his Eighth, played here in Rudolf Barshai’s chamber arrangement by the Carducci, Kyan and Oculus quartets plus two of the Elmores and double bassist Chris West. Such a lineup created a strange, occasionally scrappy blend: quartets, after all, fashion their own distinct sound and don’t easily merge into an ad hoc string orchestra. But this remained gripping in parts, its stabbed chords grizzly, its repeated theme nightmarish, the double bass casting shadow across the texture like a bruise.
• The Carducci festival at Highnam, Gloucestershire, is on 16-18 May
