String Quartet No. 10 in A-Flat Major

The 10th Quartet was begun soon after the completion of the Ninth, in 1964. Shostakovich claimed that he was keen not to let his composer friend Mieczysław Weinberg, dedicatee of this quartet, overtake him. (Weinberg had just completed his own Ninth Quartet.) But as so often with Shostakovich, the jest half-concealed something deeper: chamber music was taking over from symphonies and concertos as the favoured medium for his most private thoughts. The intimate, often hushed dialogue between the solo instruments becomes like a conversation between trusted friends, in which irony, self-mockery and other defensive ploys still play a part, but where cathartic revelation is rarely kept at bay for long. The opening movement is hushed throughout: tender, teasing, ghostly, everything subdued. Then comes a shock: a ferociously concentrated outpouring of rage, comparable to the white-water-ride scherzo of the 10th Symphony. An intense but exquisite set of variations follows: Shostakovich often chose the Baroque passacaglia form (a tightly regular sequence of variations) for his most painful personal utterances. This one eventually manages to achieve calm, if not quite serenity, ushering in a finale whose folksy opening tune looks back to the first movement. Unease grows, ushering in a return of the scherzo’s violence and the third movement’s anguished theme. Yet at the end the finale and first movement themes prevail, and all is strangely calm again.