Schnittke
String Quartet No.3
Silvestrov
String Quartet No.1
Shostakovich
String Quartet No.8
Matangi
MTM 04
Full Price
The Review
This release on the Dutch group Matangi’s own label is all too depressingly timely. It comprises of quartets written in the Soviet Union by composers who were always under stress from the censorious regime.
This release on the Dutch group Matangi’s own label is all too depressingly timely. It comprises of quartets written in the Soviet Union by composers who were always under stress from the censorious regime. Schnittke’s Third Quartet, from 1983, quotes elements from the Shostakovich as well as looking back to Beethoven and mediaeval music, perhaps demonstrating the solidarity of composers faced with political obstruction. He was anyway Shostakovich’s natural successor in the following generation and his music sits in a similar genre to the Polish composers who were his contemporaries.
The only one of the three still living as I write is Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937), at least I hope he is since he is from Kyiv. This quartet dates from 1974, the year before Shostakovich’s death, and it has a sense of spare intimacy that is similar to late Britten. Even by their standards, though, the Silvestrov quartet is monastic in its textures, barely allowing more than one note at a time in a fraught scene; as if the instruments were each giving an unrelated soliloquy in a separate area of the stage. There is something of endless snow in a flat landscape: barely a crumb of comfort in the desolation. Silvestrov’s fellow Ukrainians will recognise the feeling too well just now.
In comparison, Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet feels like a warm blanket afterwards, despite its angularity and occasional frenzy. Even if the dancing is crazy, it still lurches along, like the manic disintegration of Ravel’s La Valse. The slow movement is sombre but not grim – it was written in the middle (1960) of the Khrushchev thaw when, if not as hopeful as perestroika thirty years later, life was not as dire as it had been under Stalin.
Matangi are a persuasive quartet. They neither rush nor dawdle, avoiding the trap of equating serious intent and stillness with a ponderous tempo. Even in Silvestrov’s arid wilderness there is enough movement to pull the music along. They are crisp and accurate in this deft piece of programming: nothing to cheer about but it fits the age – ours and the composers’.
SM