PROGRAM
Emerson String Quartet performs Shostakovich
Few composers fathomed the chaos and pathos of 20th-century life as forcefully as Dmitri Shostakovich. The grim pressures he navigated as an artist and Soviet citizen, and his wide-ranging means of surviving and commenting on them, find particularly vivid expression in his fifteen string quartets. This Sunday, the eve of the hundredth anniversary of Shostakovich's birth, the renowned Emerson String Quartet returns for a program devoted his string quartet cycle. As a form, the string quartet allowed Shostakovich a measure of freedom from official scrutiny and the license to voice extremes of a sensibility that was by turns exuberant, earthy, anguished, and, in its final years, beyond the reach of other means of articulation.
MUSIC PLAYED IN THE PROGRAM
- Dmitri Shostakovich: Quartet No. 2 in A, Op. 68
—I. Overture
- Dmitri Shostakovich: Quartet No. 4 in D, Op. 83
—IV. Allegretto
- Dmitri Shostakovich: Quartet No. 13 in Bb minor, Op. 138
MIXED COMPANY
POSTED BY VAUGHN ORMSETH ON SEPTEMBER 22, 2006
Mystery Man
This program, performed by the great Emerson String Quartet, airs on the eve of Dmitri Shostakovich's hundredth birthday. With that in mind, it felt important to say something momentous, or at least new, about the composer, whose biography seems to grow less determinate with time, but whose music strikes me as ever more timely and accessible. (more)
LINKS AND RESOURCES
Artist profile: Emerson String Quartet
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Other performances on Saint Paul Sunday:
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Emerson String Quartet
Shostakovich: Breaking down silence
