String Quartet No 9 in E flat, Op 117 - Shostakovich

String Quartet No 7 in F, Op 59/1 - Beethoven

Shostakovich's Quartet No 9 is a bleak work. The basic material is limited in range and obsessively repeated. The musical language has been cleared of the rhetorical and superficial. It is tempting to relate the work to a crisis in the composer's life and see the music as a reflection of deep pessimism: the Vanbrugh Quartet, however, stressed such lyricism as there is to be found in it and generally played with a light touch, letting air in and perhaps suggesting that the work is transitional, a harbinger of brighter things.

The narrowness of its musical mood is in complete contrast, as the Vanbrugh intended, with the expansiveness of Beethoven's first "Rasumovsky" Quartet. Shostakovich uses simple means to look inward; Beethoven makes complex structures and looks outward. This reversal of attitude could be sensed in the performance. In the Beethoven, the players were much more involved and sang out, grateful for all the opportunities furnished by the composer. They could have been even more passionate but I think they like to preserve a sense of decorum and perhaps they did not wish to make too great a contrast; indeed there were moments in the Beethoven which could, fancifully, have been seen as premonitions of Shostakovich. Nevertheless, the concert could not help but emphasise the enormous gap between the two explorations of the same medium.