Jerusalem Quartet brings Shostakovich’s string quartet cycle to Cleveland
The mightiest string quartet cycle of the twentieth century is rarely encountered live. Indeed, it is probable that a complete cycle of the quartets of the formidable Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has never before been presented in the American Midwest. That is changing this month when the Jerusalem Quartet brings these intense, epic works to the Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art for a five-concert series.
The works are particularly revealing of Shostakovich’s inner world, as he often turned to the more intimate format of the string quartet when he was aggravated with the Soviet harassment of his more public symphonic works and operas. In these quartets, he was able to go places he didn’t dare to go in his more publicly-scrutinized pieces (at least not yet), such as the out-of-body drift at the end of his Third Quartet, or the brutal evocation of secret-police knocks in the Eighth, right down to the final piece, the Fifteenth Quartet, with its unheard-of sequence of six slow movements which somehow still embody a full range of human emotion. The works are the composer’s most personal odyssey, and the chance to hear them live, in chronological order, is remarkable. Seen and Heard International will be covering two of the five performances to document this important event.
This special project is being undertaken as the gem in the crown of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s seventy-fifth anniversary season. The Society has been bringing top performers from around the world to intimate venues here since 1949. It all started when a transplanted New Yorker at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and some of his colleagues persuaded the venerable Budapest Quartet to perform three concerts in Cleveland. The wildly enthusiastic audience response set the stage for the founding of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society the following year.
The Jerusalem Quartet is marking their thirtieth anniversary in 2025 by performing the Shostakovich cycle nine times in various locations around the world. The synergy of anniversary and repertoire is also being matched by a new series of recordings on the BIS label. The first one – of Shostakovich’s String Quartets Nos. 2, 7 and 10 – was released in February. The Quartet members are Alexander Pavlovsky (first violin), Sergei Bresler (second violin), Ori Kam (viola) and Kyril Zlotnikov (cello).
The concert series in Cleveland will begin on Monday, 21 April, with the first three Shostakovich quartets. Three more will come, in numerical order, on 22, 23, 29 and 30 April. All performances will take place in the Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Ticket information can be found at ClevelandChamberMusic.org here.
Mark Sebastian Jordan