Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich String Quartets, Vol. 4 (2025) [Official Digital Download]

The final volume in a distinguished quartet cycle by one of the most exciting Italian ensembles of the present day.
Founded in 2011, Quartetto Noûs have been playing Shostakovich since their earliest concerts together, and their performances, both in concert and on record, bear the mark of both deep study and complete identification with the scores. These are risk-taking, thoroughly embedded performances, as many critics have recognised, which live up to the edgy intensity of the music itself.
The Quartetto Noûs have saved up Shostakovich’s first and final essays in the quartet genre until last. The juxtaposition is arresting, though it should be remembered that the First Quartet is not ‘early’ Shostakovich and does not share the madcap energy or prodigious brilliance of works from the composer’s teens such as the First Symphony. Indeed the smoothly wrought opening of the First Quartet, from 1938, reflects its Op.49 designation within his catalogue: this is a composer who has seen and suffered much and grasped how to translate experience into sound within tightly constructed forms.
Within the First Quartet’s four-movement, 15-minute span, there is all the same no shortage of his mordant wit and his poker face. Such qualities still define the profile of the last three quartets, from the very end of the composer’s life. By this point his health was poor and his movement restricted.
The economy of means is as remarkable as the huge emotional terrain covered by these works. The instrumental scream at the end of the 13th Quartet is as bleak and terrifying as anything in 20th-century music.

TRACKLIST

1. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 1 in C Major, Op. 49: I. Moderato
2. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 1 in C Major, Op. 49: II. Moderato
3. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 1 in C Major, Op. 49: III. Allegro Molto
4. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 1 in C Major, Op. 49: IV. Allegro
5. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 13 in B-Flat Minor, Op. 138: I. Adagio - Doppio Movimento - Tempo Primo
6. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: 2 Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 36a: I. Elegy
7. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: 2 Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 36a: II. Polka
8. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: 2 Pieces for String Octet, Op. 11: I. Preludio. Adagio
9. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: 2 Pieces for String Octet, Op. 11: II. Scherzo. Allegro Molto
10. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 14 in F-Sharp, Op. 142: I. Allegretto
11. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 14 in F-Sharp, Op. 142: II. Adagio
12. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 14 in F-Sharp, Op. 142: III. Allegretto
13. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 15 in E-Flat Minor, Op. 144: I. Elegy
14. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 15 in E-Flat Minor, Op. 144: II. Serenade
15. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 15 in E-Flat Minor, Op. 144: III. Intermezzo
16. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 15 in E-Flat Minor, Op. 144: IV. Nocturne
17. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 15 in E-Flat Minor, Op. 144: V. Funeral March
18. Quartetto Noûs - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 15 in E-Flat Minor, Op. 144: Vi. Epilogue



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