Search - Dmitry Shostakovich, Manhattan String Quartet :: Shostakovitch: The Complete String Quartets (Box Set)

These recordings are truly amazing - there are none better

01/08/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I have listened to many versions of these masterpieces and these recordings, for me, best capture the emotional power and breathtaking beauty of the music. This man wrote such music!! The players are fully in control at all times, take extraordinary risks and succeed each time, and have a rare ability to convey on a very personal level the intense human dimension of these works. Listening to the Manhattans play Shostakovich is an exciting, sometimes harrowing and always rewarding experience. There are 15 of these pieces and they are all great. This series of recordings allows the listener to transverse the cycle in order, although it might be dangerous to listen to too many in a row! They are quite intense."

Manhattan SQ plays Shostakovich:Top-notch, musical, intense

Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 08/23/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It has taken some time in a new millenium to begin to be able to see Shostakovich' music more clearly overall, since none of these 15 string quartets is particularly easy to play, let alone to program in live concerts. It used to be that hearing one was something of a genuine rarity, outside Russia itself, where groups like the legendary Beethoven Quartet, or the earlier Borodin Quartet, were known for their advocacy of ... and devotion to ... Dimitri Shostakovich. Of course, to play these quartets in the Russia/USSR of their days was something of a dangerous stand to take. Shostakovich went in and out of political favor, especially with Joseph Stalin at the helm; yet DS kept writing music. By the turn of the century, more and more subsequent generations of chamber quartet string players had studied and performed these works. It is common now to admit that all of these fifteen string quartets by Shostakovich are among the very greatest to have been written in the twentieth century. Right up there, are these intense, yet quirky, gems of string writing. Some critics readily rank them at the same level of humanity of vision and technical innovation as the six famous string quartets by that other great Slav, Bela Bartok. Like the Bartok, these quartets are not for easy listening, or for background music use. Instead, each narrates something less than obvious, yet something profoundly human .... all connoting that there are bad things going bump in the night, all very much of a piece with in the horrendous cultural achievements which have accompanied the shining scientific advances of their century: giant world wars, crushing world poverty, complicated environmental degradation, famines, genocidal death campaigns, and nuclear or biological warfare. Still, those Shostakovich performances which only go for the nightmare brilliance that occurs in this music .... like the unremittingly fierce renderings of the Emerson String Quartet ... have always left me put off from the music and somewhat exhausted. Other recordings, like the cycle done by the Fitzwilliam, achieve great elegance and polish, yet somehow seem to end up by putting a scrim between me and the music's narratives. Happily, this cycle by the Manhattan String Quartet manages to stand, right at the powerful intersection of all those other approaches. The whole cycle just lets Shostakovich be himself. No player in the Manhattan needs to take a back seat to anybody else when it comes to polish, accurate intonation, or elegance of attack or of phrasing. But, also, the Manhattan Quartet can be fierce, burning with dark, fevered heats; edgy with lightening flashes when the music goes there .... but just not all the time, all the way through. Stretches of nostalgia, of energy or respose emerge like the lyrical or jaunty episodes of daily life that they no doubt were, before Shostakovich wrote them into this music. The Manhattan balances inhabit and express alive, changing moments along those continuums of interpretation where other players have staked out more extreme, and therefore to me more mannered, positions. Even more important, the Manhattan players manage through tone, phrasing, and their own varied internal balances ... to suggest that even when things are going well at the moment, some anguish or terror is still waiting in the darkness, just over there, not necessarily very far off. Happiness does not make us safe, Shostakovich seems to be saying. Neither does our tenuous safety arise from lots of other good things which we ordinarily assess as the good side of life that makes the bad side bearable. Thus, from their position astride, and amid the dynamic cores of such complex musical balancing and musical integration; I would argue that the Manhattan Quartet manage to allow those intangible spiritual dimensions which possibly unfold in the music to emerge intact. What are we to do? How can we continue to live? Acknowledging and expressing all the other, what is this, my life? These are questions that it would seem frame the very human life that Shostakovich knew and named, musically. Well, it will surprise no reader by now: I am ready to nominate this particular cycle of the fifteen quartets for Top Prizes. Also helpful to the unacquainted is the fact that the fifteen are recorded straight through in their order. You start with the first, and end with the fifteenth, having traveled through each one. Thus, you can begin to sense the immense size of the journey the composer has taken, in all. Highly recommended, then: Fifteen Stars, shining bright in the forest of the night. Like William Blake's poetry, Shostakovich is hardly ever as obvious or simple as some passing moments may appear. Like Blake, Shostakovich only glows with greater and greater humanity of suffering heart, the better acquainted you get. If you buy them, you will listen. If you listen, you will understand."

I agree...

Howard G Brown | Port St. Lucie, FL USA | 03/07/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"... completely with drd's essay and with the recommendation by Music Fan. These are sadly underated performances. I would not part with the first Borodin set, available on Chandos, nor with the recordings of 14 and 15 by the Glinka and Beethoven Quartets I bought to 'complete' the incomplete Borodin set. But that does not diminish my enthusiasm for these recordings.I do prefer this Manhattan set to the second Borodin edition, released here on BMG, but currently not available. The sound of the Manhattan set is perhaps the best available -- including the recent Emerson set -- and I have come to admire and cherish the performances projected by that vibrant, living sound. It has been said that the Borodin capture more of the ethnic elements in the music -- the strains of gypsy violins, of Jewish folk music and klezmer, ehoes from Tashkent -- whatever. How can a quartet named Manhattan NOT be in tune with ethnic diversity in music? At any rate, my admittedly western ears, hear an ensemple digging into what is on the page, and using all they have learned from research and conversation with other emsembles -- including members of the Borodin Quartet. The Manhattan Quartet did not take this project lightly, these performances reveal a devotion to the music equal to any other ensemble, abetted with sonics that rival those accorded the Takaks Quartet in their stunning Bartok set. Highly recommended."