Eliot Quartet: DSCH & Beyond

The Strad Issue: June 2025

Description: A promising start to a Shostakovich cycle with a difference

Musicians: Eliot Quartet

Works: Meyer: Au-delà d’une absence. Shostakovich: String Quartets: no.3, no.8

Catalogue number: GENUIN GEN 25919

The Polish composer Krzysztof Meyer (born 1943) was a friend of Shostakovich during the last years of the latter’s life (he completed his unfinished opera, The Gamblers, and wrote a most useful ‘life and works’). During what proved to be their last meeting, Shostakovich played for Meyer some motifs that he planned to employ in his forthcoming 16th String Quartet, which of course he never got round to writing. Many years later, Meyer decided to do it for him. The result is so completely in the style of Shostakovich that your brain is continually tickled trying to pin this harmonic twist or that turn of phrase down to one of Shostakovich’s 15 finished quartets.

The Frankfurt-based, multi-award-winning Eliot Quartet makes a most convincing case for Meyer’s evocatively titled homage. Now in its tenth year, the group strikes a beautiful balance of four independent voices bent on unanimous purpose. The players appropriately tinge the faux neo-Classicism in the opening of Shostakovich’s Third Quartet with the composer’s characteristic ambiguity, while achieving tremendous intensity in the autobiographical no.8. Caught in a lively acoustic, the instruments’ individual timbres come forcefully to the fore. Meyer’s illuminating booklet notes immensely enhance the value of what promises to be an exhilarating Shostakovich cycle. I, for one, am already wondering which intriguing connections the Eliot will explore in the following volumes.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE