Although the string quartet lies at the heart of Shostakovich’s chamber music output, he came late to the genre; the First (1938) was begun as an inconsequential exercise after the Fifth Symphony’s ‘reply to justified criticism’. He then developed such a taste for quartet-writing that he produced no fewer than fifteen in all! But unlike Bartók, who made the genre a laboratory for his experiments, this most controversial composer of the Soviet era considered his quartets more as a kind of ‘intimate theatre’, as paradoxical as their creator – as can be seen in these three key works spread over nearly thirty years of his life.
