Altius Quartet: Shostakovich String Quartets 7, 8 & 9
Navona Records
These sterling performances of Shostakovich's seventh, eighth, and ninth string quartets make abundantly clear why they're still so avidly listened to fifty-plus years after being written, the seventh and eighth in 1960 and ninth four years later. Accounting for their appeal isn't hard: abundant in melody, rhythmic drive, emotion, and contrast, the works exude urgency, their forward momentum bolstered by the absence of pauses between movements. They're also concise and economical, so much so that Altius's rendering of the seventh weighs in at no more than twelve minutes, and in these works the Russian composer weaves melody and rhythm into material that's not only marked by artistic integrity but communicates with immediacy.
No matter how great a composer's material is, it'll suffer if weakly performed. No one need worry on that count here: on Altius Quartet's follow-up to its Navona debut release, Dress Code, violinists Andrew Giordano and Joshua Ulrich, violist Andrew Krimm, and cellist Zachary Reaves honour Shostakovich with impassioned readings. If emotion runs high, it's not only attributable to the group's playing but to the intensely personal dimension of the quartets, which carry deeply heartfelt dedications: the seventh to his first wife, Nina Vasilyevna Varza, who died from complications during emergency surgery (indicative of the composer's anguish, he wrote the words “To live for you! To die for you!” in the score); the eighth, written after he reluctantly joined the Communist Party, to the victims of fascism and the second world war; and the ninth to his third wife, Irina Antonovna Shostakovich.
His penchant for impishly devilish melodies emerges in the seventh quartet's opening movement, an allegretto that Altius etches with consummate skill. Though brief, the central lento proves haunting, whereas the agitated third movement packs an intensely aggressive punch in the fury with which its rapid flurries are executed. Regardless of whether the musicians play in artful counterpoint or unison, the group's sound is precise where it needs to be as well as lush when necessary.
Of the three, it's the eighth that's most well-known, and Altius's performance makes it easy to understand why. The brooding quartet distills the composer's strengths into a compact, five-movement presentation that seamlessly segues from the mournful, hymn-like solemnity of the graceful largo to the relentless attack of the allegro molto and the masterful allegretto, melody paramount no matter how anguished the mood of the movement; capping the work is a largo of powerfully elegiac character. (As a side note, it's interesting that Bernard Herrmann's score for Hitchcock's Psycho also appeared in 1960, considering how much the eighth quartet's stabbing figures call to mind the visceral sting of the soundtrack's strings.)
Compared to the eighth, the ninth feels more intimate and less oppressed by tragedy. Though structured in five movements like its predecessor, the 1964 creation possesses a more hopeful tone, as signified by playful phrases that emerge during the opening part and the allegretto, the latter (and closing allegro) even including galloping figures of a vaguely William Tell Overture-like kind. No performance of a composer's work is ever definitive, of course, but it would be hard to imagine many bettering Altius's renderings, which capture with poise and eloquence the many emotional facets Shostakovich channeled into these enduring pieces.November 2017