Malvern Concert Club: Brodsky Quartet – Quartets 10 & 15

(Introductory note to Quartets 10 & 15 by Paul Cassidy)

Perhaps it’s because of where it lies in the cycle, between Nina, Dmitri and Irina and the four members of the Beethoven Quartet, but No.10 always strikes me as a little oasis. Whilst its outer movements remain eerily subdued, drained of hope and with little to prove, they do nonetheless serve to highlight two of the most striking movements in the whole set. The furioso second, with its 347 bars of unrelenting venom, is arguably the most bitter of his tirades. This is followed by a particularly beautiful passacaglia whose form is a bit of a Shostakovich trademark. Rather in the way that so many of Beethoven’s great slow movements are in fact sets of variations, so the passacaglia form allows Dmitri to lay out a bass line and repeat it as often as necessary, adding more and more beauty around it. Like Bach before them, these two giants were formidable improvisers.

And so we come to No.15. and frankly, what to say? This is the most intimate and profound commentary on the eternal question of life and death – what’s it all about? The music is stripped back to its bare bones, perpetually alone. Only for one brief moment of its heavenly length do the four players collectively exist. The work is full of emotion, beauty, love, tragedy, humour – it’s all there, but expressed existentially by a mind which appears to be straddling that nebulous line between reality and the unknown. It was Shostakovich’s genius which allowed him to capture these images for us mere mortals to reflect upon.