String Quartet No.6 in G major Op.101 (1956)

All four movements of Shostakovich’s Sixth String Quartet end with the same reassuring harmonies quietly drawn over a short but expressive cadence figure on the cello. So, whatever discomfort is experienced in the meantime, tranquillity is always restored. No that there is much discomfort in this work. The repeated notes on the viola before the entry of the genial main theme of the first movement become an increasingly obsessive preoccupation, to the extent that they are hammered out in fortissimo double stops at one point, but they are brought back into proportion long before the end. There is no problem with the melodious second movement, except perhaps for a first violin perilously exposed at the top of its range, while the Lento - a passacaglia on a chromatic bass line sustained by the cello - is more enigmatic than uncomfortable. The cadence this time leads directly into the closing Allegretto, which clarifies the situation by recalling the passacaglia theme in canon on cello and viola at the climax of the movement and, later, the repeated notes from the beginning of the work before by now familiar, reassuring ending.