String Quartet No.2 in A major, Op.68

Theme and Variations: Adagio - Moderato con moto - Allegretto - Allegro non troppo - Allegro - Adagio

Rehearsing the Quartet in A major with the composer one day, Dmitri Tsyganov, the leader of the Beethoven Quartet, remarked that the violin Recitative in the second movement might have been written for him. “Yes, indeed it was, Mitya,” Shostakovich replied. “I wrote it for you.” The Second Quartet was to be the first of no fewer than fourteen such works conceived with the sound and personality of the Beethoven Quartet in mind. The not very serious Quartet No.1 in C major had been entrusted to another ensemble in 1938 but six years later - congenially installed in the Union of Composers’ “House of Rest and Creativity” at Ivanovo and by now well acquainted with the Beethoven Quartet - Shostakovich had the time and the confidence to make a very much more ambitious approach to the medium. The ambition and the collaboration were to be sustained for the next thirty years.

Dedicated to Shostakovich’s composer colleague Visarion Shebalin and remote from the war-time concerns that had inspired the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, the Second String Quartet is about purely musical issues. It could be that it was to make that point that Shostakovich gave each movement a purely musical title - even at the risk of misleading the listener into expecting the Overture to be no more than a mere prelude. The Moderato con moto is, in fact, an extended and dramatically motivated construction, to be played loud or very loud for the most part and avoiding any reassuring recall of its A major opening until the last page, where the two main themes are briefly recapitulated.

Tsyganov’s extraordinary Recitative not only opens the second movement, deliberating on motifs from the Moderato con moto while anticipating the melodic material of the central Romance, but also closes it with similar eloquence. The supple and ghostly Valse in E flat minor remains muted throughout in spite of impassioned efforts to exceed the dynamic limits in the middle. There is no such restriction on the last movement, which is gentle enough at the point where the viola introduces the folk-like theme but which accelerates through a series of often turbulent and rhythmically obsessive variations before the restoration of the Adagio tempo for the expressive and emphatically A minor ending.