Casals Quartet: Shostakovich

The Strad Issue: September 2025

Description: An ongoing Shostakovich cycle hits the mark

Musicians: Casals Quartet

Works: Shostakovich: String Quartets vol.2: nos.6–11

Catalogue number: HARMONIA MUNDI HMM90273334 (2 CDs)

Shostakovich’s quartets, arguably more than any of his other music, invite us into his inner world. In the six here in this latest volume from the Casals Quartet, his mastery of contrapuntal techniques binds together the movements in an endless array of compelling invention. But it is unadorned: Shostakovich’s outlook is bleak, and decorated in shades of grey. Yet despite this feeling of near despair, we are gripped – lured into the black mystery with rapt attention.

The Casals Quartet has stripped away the timbres to an elegant leanness that depicts with detail and clarity this soul-searching journey, by turns ironic, gritty, angry and brutal. The fast tempos demand complete rhythmic control and supreme dexterity, all of which the Casals has in abundance. The darkly brooding Largos beg for an almost seamless homophonic blending as we trudge through the icy melodies that torture us with their piquantly meandering semitones. And the Casals lends empathy to this desolation.

According to Elizabeth Wilson’s stellar booklet notes, the Sixth Quartet is the most upbeat work featured here. But although the Casals presents a jaunty conception of the second movement and Finale, an element of unease is never far from the surface in its reading.

In contrast to this more lyrical fare, the Seventh Quartet offers a memorial to Shostakovich’s first wife – a numb anguish the Casals depicts with tender perception in the second movement as the almost lifeless high notes incant over the muted glissandos. Here the music seems to be not of this world – a dislocation fully realised.

Despair and depression burden the Eighth Quartet; Shostakovich was made to join the Communist party. His DSCH motive trickles through the work in an obsessive manner. The players capture the composer’s fury in a performance that screams with intensity in the second and third movements. There’s no pretence to the Eleventh: the gloves are off with raging brutal dissonances seared into the texture. Calibrating all these varying grey-steel emotions is an art, and one this group has fully mastered.

JOANNE TALBOT