A decade ago, marking 40 years since the composer’s death, the Carducci Quartet played Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets in a remarkable day-long marathon. This year is the 50th anniversary, but how do you follow that? For the Carduccis, the answer was to look outwards: programming the Shostakovich quartets they’ve played so often across five concerts alongside works by the Russian composer’s students and sharing their platform with newer, up-and-coming groups.
The Carduccis opened this penultimate concert with Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 4, which runs from spare, plaintive folksiness to full-throttle pseudo-klezmer. The former showcased the Carduccis’ exquisitely blended tone. The latter, the drama that can be generated from rustic pizzicatos, the hard catch of bow hair on string, the intensity of a cello melody eked out of a stratospheric thumb position. But there was also a hint of business as usual – the first violin always dominant, energy always injected by the cello, the overall sound always mellow.
