Reviews by Kevin McLaughlin, Daniel Hathaway, & Stephanie Manning
To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society engaged the dauntless Jerusalem Quartet to play a complete cycle of Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets. The works were performed in chronological order over five evenings in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
The performances were treated like an art exhibition accompanied by an elaborate, 45-page catalog full of documentation about the composer, whose life and career under the Soviet system left an indelible mark on his music. A timeline that runs along the bottom of the program pages helped put Shostakovich’s compositions in historical context.
Monday, April 21 — “World War II: Before, During and After”
Quartets Nos. 1 (1938), 2 (1944), & 3 (1946)
Timeline events: World War II, Stalin Prize for “Leningrad” Symphony, Communist Party denouncement and firings from Moscow and Leningrad conservatories, travel to USA as delegate to the Cultural & Scientific Conference for World Peace, hears the Juilliard Quartet play Bartók quartets.
by Kevin McLaughlin
The Jerusalem Quartet delivered both power and nuance during the first week of Dmitri Shostakovich’s complete string quartet cycle — a magnificent capstone and celebration of the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s 75th anniversary season.
I heard (for review) string quartets 1-3 on Monday, April 21, and quartets 7-9 on Wednesday, April 23 — and I’ll bet that like many in the audience, I’m still recovering. The ensemble’s astonishing playing transfixed listeners and exacted an emotional price. I also went on Tuesday, and the experience grew in intensity as the musicians probed the psychological complexities of these quartets, widely acknowledged as some of Shostakovich’s most inward and personal expressions.
The cycle opened with the relatively light and lyrical First Quartet, Op. 49, written in 1938 and set in C major — a piece Shostakovich once described as evoking a “spring-like mood.” The Jerusalem players brought a sense of clarity and Haydn-esque wit to it with their clean articulation and elegant phrasing.
First violinist Alexander Pavlovsky spun Shostakovich’s melodies with a childlike sincerity and a subtle unease, hinting that innocence here is not to be trusted. Violist Ori Kam and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov maintained low register tension in the slow movement, corroborating its harmonic ambiguity. Mutes cast a scrim of non-reality over the scherzo. Mutes off for the finale, the players brought the first quartet to a close with unbridled joy and roughhousing.
With the Second Quartet, written in 1944 during the turmoil of World War II, the atmosphere darkened considerably. The musicians leaned into its emotional depth — especially Pavlovsky, who said in a recent conversation with ClevelandClassical.com that of all the Shostakovich quartets, No. 2 is “his love.” In the second movement Adagio, Shostakovich writes a broadly expressive “recitative and romance” for the first violin, ranging, as Pavlovsky said, “from the most personal crying, to the most brutal.”
In the waltz that followed, cellist Zlotnikov led the ensemble with sonorous tone and full bow strokes — an expressive habit that his colleagues shared, making the most of their far-flung variations in the finale before resolving the final cadence with a tragic turn to the parallel minor.
Quartet No. 3, the most harrowing of the first three works, received the most emotional performance of the evening. Composed in the immediate aftermath of the war, its five-movement structure traces a psychological arc from ironic cheer to despair.
The ensemble brought out the sarcasm of the opening Allegretto with biting wit, then shifted seamlessly into the mournful shadows of the subsequent movements. The fourth features an ominous passacaglia, which gradually dissolves into a funeral march and a slow descent into darkness rendered with heartbreaking restraint. The finale offered no easy resolution, but its fragile, shimmering textures brought out the music’s poignant human anguish.
Tuesday, May 22 — “Melancholic Anxieties”
Quartets Nos. 4 (1949), 5 (1952), & 6 (1956)
Timeline Events: Elected to Supreme Soviet, Deaths of Stalin, D.S.’s wife Nina Varzar, and D.S.’s mother, marriage to Margarita Kainova.
by Daniel Hathaway
More personal than political, the next three quartets in the cycle find Shostakovich absorbed with romance, marriage, divorce and death, although Joseph Stalin’s demise in 1953 removed one persistent irritant from his professional life. That made it possible for him to bring his Fourth Quartet with its quotations from Orthodox chant and its spirited Klezmer-influenced finale into the light some four years after it was written.
The opening movements are first undergirded by a drone in the viola and cello, then by an ostinato that supports contemplative solos from the first violin and cello. Mutes go on for the return of the second movement theme, marking a change in sound that persists in the third, which finds the still-muted quartet transparently gliding as if skating on ice. The raucous finale, full of cries, shouts, and jokes, takes a break for a more lyrical section before returning to the opening material and suddenly trailing off into nothingness.
Once the backstory of the Fifth Quartet was revealed — a chronicle of the composer’s emotional reactions to being spurned in romance by one of his students after the death of his first wife — its musical vicissitudes become clearer.
After a tumultuous opening that swept you off your feet and developed into hypnotic rumblings, alternately engaging and disturbing themes came to the fore. Time and again, the composer’s more cheerful tunes — in this case an innocent waltz — ran aground and were answered by wispy, stratospheric noodlings in the violins. A violent outburst turned into a lament after attempts to reinstate the waltz proved futile.
Quartet No. 6, written shortly after Shostakovich’s remarriage, commences with a lilting dance answered by a sinister response as Shostakovich breaks up, then reassembles the theme. Here, the composer’s emotional vacillations found the Jerusalem players crafting both huge sounds and soft, calming cadences. The slow passacaglia of the third movement and the lighthearted march that forms the fourth before ending with a soothing coda are reassuring signs that some things are going right for the composer.
Wednesday, April 23 — “Looking Back and Moving Forward”
Quartets Nos. 7 (1959-1960), 8 (1960), & 9 (1964)
Timeline events: Health begins to deteriorate, Lenin Prize, divorces Margarita Kainova, second visit to the U.S., joins communist party, becomes member of Supreme Soviet, marries Irina Supinskaya.
by Kevin McLaughlin
On Wednesday, the audience’s burden of the spirit only grew heavier — and somehow more profound and beautiful.
Clocking in at just under twelve minutes, Quartet No. 7 is the shortest of Shostakovich’s fifteen, but no less intense. Written to memorialize his first wife, Nina, it is a compact expression of grief and alienation.
The Jerusalem Quartet brought a hushed urgency to the opening Allegretto, its brittle phrases passing like whispered thoughts between the players. In the jagged second movement, they found an uncontained, explosive force within the quartet’s terse architecture. The ghostly waltz of the finale, delivered with icy precision, lingered in the air like a half-forgotten but inescapable memory. The Jerusalem’s taut and affecting performance made the most of the work’s enigmatic brevity.
Few chamber works carry the autobiographical weight of Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8, composed in three days during a visit to war-ravaged Dresden. The Jerusalem Quartet approached this searing requiem “to the victims of fascism and war” but also for the composer himself — with riveting intensity.
The opening Largo, centered on Shostakovich’s musical signature (the pitches D-S-C-H in their German spelling), was played with haunting reverence, each note carrying a heavy toll. The violent outbursts of the Allegro movements crackled with desperation and transitions were played without pause, each mood passing uneasily into the next. The closing Largo returned to the opening theme, now hollowed out and hushed, with the players — like the audience — barely breathing through the final, frozen chords.
Quartet No. 9 offered a contrasting journey — one that shifts from shadowy uncertainty toward defiant, if ironic, triumph. The Jerusalem players took their time with the opening Moderato, allowing the music’s creeping unease to unfold with subtle tension. As the five uninterrupted movements progressed, the players elucidated its labyrinthine architecture.
The propulsive rhythms of the third and fourth sections bristled with energy, and the interplay between voices was electric with aggressive pizzicati and jagged accents. By the time the wild fifth movement arrived, it was clear that it would offer not resolution, but confrontation. The Jerusalem didn’t sugarcoat the ambiguity but let the brutality of the music speak for itself, as Shostakovich surely intended.
Tuesday, April 29 — “Outer Peace and Inner Turmoil”
Quartets Nos. 10 (1964), 11 (1966), & 12 (1968)
Timeline events: Receives Order of Lenin, becomes Hero of Socialist Labour, suffers a heart attack, diagnosed with rare form of poliomyelitis.
by Stephanie Manning
In the brief silence that followed the spellbinding second movement of the Tenth Quartet that opened Tuesday’s program, someone behind me quietly let out a breath they’d been holding. That’s pretty much what it was like to listen to the Jerusalem, whose performances of Shostakovich’s works were so captivating that mundane things — like breathing — seemed to fall away.
The pensive first and third movements of the Tenth benefited greatly from the performers’ equanimity — both in their blend of tone and willingness to cede the floor to whatever musical voice most needed to speak. First violinist Alexander Pavlovsky wisely reined in his energy early on, making his furious approach to the second movement all the more breathtaking. Violist Ori Kam later channeled this same approach in his confident announcement of the finale.
With its seven movements, the most numerous of all the Shostakovich Quartets, the Eleventh stands out. In brief snapshots, framed by a central key of F minor, the players toured through all a variety of moods — from the pounding pulse of the second-movement Scherzo to the fervently dissonant third-movement Recitative.
Shostakovich posthumously dedicated this work to the second violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, Vasili Shirinsky, and Sergei Bresler, the Jersusalm’s second violinist, gamely played both collaborator and soloist. As the engine of the fifth movement, he doggedly pushed through endless loops of the same two notes before he spun out a low and mournful solo in the sixth movement Elegy.
The moody themes of the Twelfth Quartet often use all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale, casting an unsettled aura on a piece otherwise in D-flat major. The opening Allegretto section of the second movement stood out for the players’ insistent trills and biting pizicattos. Cellist Kyril Zlotnikov produced an expansive, robust sound in the first Adagio section. As the four musicians built up volume and intensity to the end, the overall effect mirrored how the beginning of the concert felt — utterly absorbing.
Wednesday, April 30 — “Swan Songs”
Quartets Nos. 13 (1970), 14 (1973), & 15 (1974)
Timeline events: Suffers second heart attack, diagnosed with lung cancer, third visit to U.S., honorary doctorate from Northwestern, consults American doctors.
by Daniel Hathaway
The sixth and final concert of the Shostakovich series began solemnly, with Chamber Music Society president Fern Jennings’ announcement of the death of longtime member Karel Paukert earlier that day at the age of 90.
In his program notes, Peter Laki draws a parallel between Beethoven and Shostakovich, both of whom wrote “late” string quartets that have a summarizing or valedictory quality. Jennings fittingly announced that tonight’s performance of No. 13 would be dedicated to Paukert’s memory.
That work introduced for the first time a variety of col legno in which players are asked to tap with the wood of their bows not on the strings, but on the bodies of their instruments — perhaps somewhat to the horror of those who own pricey violins, violas, or cellos. Otherwise, in No. 14 the Quartet masterfully shaped long solos that were either unaccompanied or supported simply, and made extensive lines from smaller melodic segments seamlessly joined together.
The evening and the five-concert cycle ended with a surprise: the house lights were doused for Quartet No. 15, a series of six Adagios including an Elegy, a Serenade, an Intermezzo, a Nocturne, a Funeral March, and an Epilogue — played without pause but each strikingly different in character. The Jerusalem instantly changed up their emotional content, fading into a lengthy silence at the end.
Before the program began, Fern Jennings asked a few demographic questions of the large audience in Gartner Auditorium, the last asking for a show of hands from people who had attended all five performances. Many hands went up.
Kevin McLaughlin adds a postscript:
A congratulatory word should be added here about the exemplary program book assembled by Sharon Muskin and designed by Andrew Jerabek (the same graphic artist who designs program books for ChamberFest Cleveland). Praise too for the clear and informative program notes by Peter Laki, and the outstanding pre-concert talks given by James Wilding, whose commentaries were models of succinct and engaging communication.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com May 14, 2025
Click here for a printable copy of this article
