String Quartet No. 2 in A Major

​After composing his String Quartet No. 1, six years passed before Shostakovich returned to the form. Now the circumstances were very different. The Second Quartet (1944) was composed while he was safe at an artistic retreat, well to the east of Moscow and the horrors of the Nazi invasion. It is much longer and more ambitious than Quartet No. 1, at the same time more fiercely concentrated than his two recent symphonies, No. 7 (“Leningrad”) and No. 8. A steely determination drives the fast opening movement. Although the key is officially a bright A major, the music soon shows a tendency to turn to the darker minor, as when the folkish opening theme returns. The second movement, a superficially calmer “Recitative and Romance”, veers between lyrical tenderness and nervy chromaticism, and it’s no surprise when this movement is followed by a sinister rapid “Waltz”. At one point there’s a sly allusion to Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, still unperformed and wisely hidden in his desk draw. It’s as though Shostakovich had realised that the more private medium of the quartet might become a “safe space” for exploring thoughts it would be dangerous to air in public. Then the finale is a firmly minor-key set of variations on a theme that strongly echoes the opening motif of Mussorgsky’s bleakly tragic national opera Boris Godunov—and at the end, significantly, it is this motif that is raised aloft in grim splendour.