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01/22/2026
“Complete String Quartets: Volume 3”
Dmitri Shostakovich: String Quartets n° 13 in B‑Flat minor, opus 138, n° 14 in F‑Sharp major, opus 142, & n° 15 in E‑Flat minor, opus 144
Cuarteto Casals: Vera Martínez Mehner, Abel Tomàs Realp (violin), Jonathan Brown (viola), Arnau Tomàs Realp (cello)
Recording: La Courroie, Entraigues-sur-la-Sorgue, France (May 2024) – 78’81
harmonia mundi HMM 902735 (Distributed by [Integral]) - Booklet in French, English and German
From the opening String Quartet n° 13’s “Adagio” of Cuarteto Casals’ recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Complete String Quartets: Volume 13”, we are inside the composer’s prismatic musicality. Technically and aesthetically, he was in his most liberated musical period, after years of being both embraced and condemned by Soviet Russia.
A string quartet series, composed in the final years of his life, Shostakovich was planning to compose one for every key, but he died in 1975, only completing 15 of the planned 24. What he did complete is a testament to a composer who had suffered so many indignities from his native country; nonetheless, it is in top form, and it is out from under the Soviet Iron Curtain. These String Quartets are a revelation of Shostakovich’s liberated musical journey. His articulations are of an expansive neo-modernist and classical soundworld.
All dimensions of this quartet cycle are performed with stunning technical precision by the Cuarteto Casals musicians. You get the clear sense that the Quartet’s collective interpretive artistry is laser-focused on what Shostakovich wanted to say musically and otherwise with these works.
Shostakovich’s musical template, in itself, is a statement of a resilient musical life and is one of the 20th Century’s most dynamic and innovative composers, embraced by Russian fans during his early years while playing scores of silent films.
Stalin had already had his Soviet commissars turn up the heat on the composer. After the Macbeth episode, his state salary had been cut, and he was being artistically exiled, criticized for composing ‘Western’ music or indulging in ‘formalism’ instead of expressing ‘Soviet realism’ or proletarian music.
His brilliant early years as a concert composer of symphonies and operas in Stalin’s Russia made him world famous until Stalin turned against him, storming out of a performance of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and instructing Pravda to slam the work as “muddle” instead of music.
Shostakovich started composing showpiece symphonics, full of muscled orchestral flare, that fell in line with Soviet expectations, but it’s evident in that ballast, Shostakovich laced the passages that embraced free expression, folkloric richness and cultural diversity.
Brian Morton reports in his book, Shostakovich: A Coded Life in Music,
when the composer was 10, he witnessed a young boy being hacked to death by a cossack, apparently because he stole an apple. Morton writes “...in Shostakovich’s mind, there was scant moral differentiation between the victims of the Tzar’s repression and the later casualties of Stalin’s communist terror.”
Things cooled for a period, but another composition that, too, was branded as too lighthearted and un‑proletariat, landed him back in disfavor. Increasingly, he relented, even when through the motions of towing the Soviet musical line for fear of his life and that of his family.
Stress and setbacks were taking a toll. Shostakovich had many periods of ill health, starting with childhood tuberculous, and later acute appendicitis, and neurological disorders that caused spasms, and ongoing weakness in his hands, making it difficult for him to compose at the piano.
By the 1960s Shostakovich was numb from the artistic oppression and personal humiliations he endured under Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s artistic shakedowns. Yet, it probably was his international standing that saved his life, if not his career. It is a musical testament to the composer’s singular voice (over the years) that was vilified, compromised and teaming with compositional brilliance.
Whatever self-censoring or coded music Shostakovich had to produce to literally stay alive under Stalin’s regime, was compositionally unburdened. Here is revealed the textures and voices of the strings, moments of jazz progression and breathing passages of innovative musical radiance. Experimenting with serial variants of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone template is the single movement Quartet n° 13. Composed in 1970, it conjures a free‑flowing musicality that’s quintessential Shostakovich.
The Quartet n° 14 features a lusty cello protagonist and dervishy violin counterpoint, painting a swirling soundscape with instruments dancing around each other. During moments of dissonantly piercing voicings, it’s the viola that guides the harmonic progressions. Cellist Realp’s intoxicating lead in concert with the other strings is masterful. Shostakovich dedicated the work to Russia’s Beethoven Quartet favorite, cellist Sergey Shirinsky. Also present is the subtle homage to Britten’s Cello Symphony, and in the third movement, there’s an allusive basso resonance and concertizing echoes of the “Seryozha Aria” from the vilified Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
In the final String Quartet n° 15 the quartet begins with a contemplative “Elegy. Adagio”, the first of six miniatures. Elizabeth Wilson’s excellent liner notes writes...“the Funeral March’s dotted rhythms provide a last gasp of life before dissolving into the void.” But the past, buried inside the soulful reaches of the String Quartet n° 15, doesn’t strike as mournful or bitter, but a transcendent musical truth and the imprimatur of artistic courage.
Lewis J Whittington
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