Shostakovich - Complete String Quartets Vol 3 (Nos 8, 9 & 13)

'Their Ninth Quartet, placed first on this disc, strikes me as especially fine.'
- Gramophone

'This is the third volume of the Sorrel's complete Shostakovich cycle and very fine performances they are.'
- Sunday Telegraph

"The deeply committed, skilful performances of the Sorrel Quartet serve Shostakovich well, confirming his contribution among the major composers of music for the string quartet medium."
(MusicWeb Dec 2001)

The Sorrel Quartet continues its series of Shostakovich's string quartets on Chandos, the previous two volumes of which have been well received.

The Sorrel Quartet has a growing discography on Chandos. They have already proved themselves equally at home in works by composers as diverse as Carwithen, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Britten and most recently Elgar

The Eighth String Quartet in C minor was composed in the astonishingly short period of three days, in July 1960. Shostakovich had been visiting Dresden for the purpose of collaborating on a film commemorating the wartime destruction of the city. Instead he felt compelled to set to work on a new string quartet, which he dedicated 'to the memory of facism and war'. In a letter to a close friend, Shostakovich confided that he had written the quartet in memory of himself. A source close to the composer recorded that this was a time of deep depression in his career and that, in a suicidal state of mind, he was regarding the Eighth String Quartet as his last work. The special autobiographical significance of the work manifests itself in the actual fabric of the music. Quotation was becoming one of Shostakovich's favourite compositional devices, and in this quartet he quotes reflectively from his own previous compositions, in more or less chronological order, as if replaying significant events of his life.

The Ninth String Quartet was composed in 1964. The work marks a fresh stage in the composer's development, both in its anticipation of the more radical, stridently dissonant Shostakovich of the Twelfth Quartet and in the way in which it builds on the special experience of the Eighth Quartet with its motto-theme technique and its overlapping five-movement continuity.

With its adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method, its daring use of timbre, its high level of dissonances and its spare textures, the Thirteenth String Quartet, so admired by Benjamin Britten, is perhaps the composer's most advanced work and could be regarded as a kind of homage to Webern.

Volumes One and Two in this series have received excellent reviews:

'The phrasing is elegant, the textures lucid… an auspicious beginning.'
The Guardian on CHAN 9741 (Volume One)

'The playing is so wonderfully on the music's wavelength - quietly hyper-intense, while always threatening to detonate…'
Classic FM on CHAN 9741 (Volume One)