Call My Name

Read About This Recording

Shostakovich was an established, even popular, composer — albeit, one who had been touched by Stalinist terror — when he embarked upon his First String Quartet in 1938. The first movement of this First Quartet opens genially with a backward, Biedermeierish glance at the era of the aged Haydn and the young Spohr, though from the first the curious harmonization of its innocuous melodies lends them a cracked air, fraught now with a strange smile, now with a fleeting grimace, as they trip concisely through their sonata form tropes.

Thus opens something like a 15-part journal whose ironic, sardonic, jesting, anguished and allusive narrator becomes ever more elusive as episodes of great beauty and grandeur beckon between outbursts of startling ferocity, nightmarish visions and vast vistas of desolation.

The sheer emotional range — rife with subtle subtext — of these enigmatic masterpieces has defeated a surprising legion of string quartets who sought to say it all. Amid the partial successes, much brilliant playing which missed the point, richly colored readings and drab, clever interpretive feints, and the like, the Fitzwilliam String Quartet’s intégral has maintained a secure place for a reliable combination of idiom, impassioned divination and sheer voltage. In 1992, Gramophone noted that “The Fitzwilliam Quartet recorded their cycle in the mid-1970s, shortly after a concentrated period of study with the composer. Nos. 4 and 12 won a Gramophone Award in 1977. Despite being recorded in analogue, the sound-quality is still remarkably good …it is the performances of the Fitzwilliam Quartet to which I find myself being drawn back.”

In 1998, Fanfare’s Richard Burke still preferred “the often deceptive grace of the Fitzwilliam” to the latest installment by the Éder Quartet. And in June of last year, another Gramophone reviewer harked back — “The Fitzwilliam Quartet… worked with the composer himself on the 13th Quartet, and the experience left such a mark that the group asked that there be no applause when they played the piece at public concerts. Now we have the Emerson Quartet, and, for all their splenetic projection, they bring something different: an objectified, technocratic sensibility that, like it or not, we will be hearing more of in the future.” So it is not too much to call the Fitzwilliam’s go with Shostakovich classic, and an indispensable cornerstone in any collection of that composer’s works.

—Adrian Corleonis

Quotes

"Despite being recorded in analogue, the sound-quality is still remarkably good...it is the performances of the Fitawilliam Quartet to which I find myself being drawn back." —Gramophone

Contents

Includes String Quartets: No. 1 in C Major, Op. 49; No. 2 in A Major, Op. 68; No. 3 in F Major, Op. 73; No. 4 in D Major, Op. 83; No. 5 in B-Flat Major, Op. 92; No. 6 in G Major, Op. 101; No. 7 in F Sharp Minor, Op. 108; No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 110; No. 9 in E-Flat Major, Op. 117; No. 10 in A-Flat Major, Op. 118; No. 11 in F Minor, Op. 122; No. 12 in D-Flat Major, Op. 133; No. 13 in B-Flat Minor, Op. 138; No. 14 in F Sharp Major, Op. 142; No. 15 in E-Flat Minor, Op. 144.

Fitzwilliam String Quartet.