Walton & Shostakovich String Quartets

At first, this may seem like an unlikely pairing, yet both quartets were completed in 1946 and in their different ways encapsulate the supreme challenge of creative endeavour in the immediate post-war era. Walton described the effort as like being overcome by “barbed wire entanglements”, while Shostakovich was fighting his own internal political battles with the Soviet state machine, which had recently condemned his Ninth Symphony as lacking in heroic fibre. The all-star Albion Quartet—violinists Tamsin Waley-Cohen and Emma Parker, violist Ann Beilby and cellist Nathaniel Boyd—bring the tormented neoclassical ironies of the Shostakovich bracingly to life: the brutal gunfire of the central “Allegro non troppo” movement will have you diving for cover. Yet perhaps even more startlingly, they uncover a vein of wistfulness and barely disguised anger in the Walton that suggests a composer literally on the brink.