Belcea Quartet & Piotr Anderszewski – Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 3 & Piano Quintet (2018) [FLAC 24bit/44,1kHz]

Formed in 1994 at the Royal College of Music in London, the Belcea Quartet has recorded the complete string quartets of Beethoven, Brahms, Bartók and Britten. For this new Alpha release it has chosen two works by one of the leading composers of twentieth-century chamber music, Dmitri Shostakovich. The Quartet no.3, of historic importance, was initially censured by the Soviet regime, then revised by Shostakovich for its first performance in 1946; the refined playing of the Belcea Quartet brings out all its contours. The Piano Quintet is among its composer’s most famous works and significantly contributed to his success on the international scene and with the Soviet authorities. The Belcea Quartet performs it in the company of the Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski: the result is a musical encounter at the highest level of excellence.

Although Shostakovich’s Third Quartet and his Piano Quintet have long been a part of the Belcea Quartet’s and Piotr Anderszewski’s repertoires, they had never recorded any of the composer’s material. There is an interesting analogy between this point in the careers of the quartet and the pianist on the one hand and the composer’s own life on the other: it was at the age of 32 that, although he was already onto his fifth symphony, Shostakovich wrote his first string quartet. For a long time his demanding attitude towards himself held him back from attempting what he saw as “one of the most difficult of all the musical genres”. The impetus came – against the composer’s will – from the dastardly Stalin, who had sparked the greatest crisis in Shostakovich’s career: in 1936 the dictator had attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which later got an ominous review in Pravda, which growled about “chaos replacing music” and denounced “hysterical, degenerate music”. The young composer ran the risk of arrest and execution: and so it should come as no surprise that after that experience he turned to the more private genre of the string quartet. Every listener can make their own between-the-lines reading of political protests or humanist messages in the work: at any rate it is very hard to see “just” pure music here, for all its fluency. That applies just as much to the Third Quartet of 1946, in which passages recalling Haydn rub shoulders with rather more violent material. The Quintet for Piano and Strings dates back to 1940, and it received the Stalin Prize – which was symptomatic of the unpredictable relations between Shostakovich and the regime, which saw him at once as traitor to the people and a model artist. The composer claimed that he added the piano part to his quintet so as to be able to play it himself, and to take advantage of whatever travel opportunities might come his way as a result…

Tracklist:
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
01. Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57: I. Prelude (Lento) 04:46
02. Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57: II. Fugue (Adagio) 11:34
03. Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57: III. Scherzo (Allegretto) 03:37
04. Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57: IV. Intermezzo (Lento) 07:02
05. Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57: V. Finale (Allegretto) 07:40
06. String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73: I. Allegretto 07:27
07. String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73: II. Moderato con moto 05:37
08. String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73: III. Allegro non troppo 04:12
09. String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73: IV. Adagio 06:00
10. String Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73: V. Moderato 11:12

Personnel:
Belcea Quartet
Piotr Anderszewski, piano

Download:

mqs.link_BelceaQuartetPitrAnderszewskiShstakvichStringQuartetN.3PianQuintet20182444.1.rar

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