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. [Read more…]