Shostakovich: String Quartets No. 3 & No. 8

Album review

Flawless technique, impeccable balance, and a luminously clear-toned and supremely elegant, slender sound. These are the qualities we’ve come to anticipate from the recordings of former Salzburg Mozart Competition winners the Novus Quartet, who formed in 2007 at the Korean National University of the Arts. And there’s much to play to those strengths in the two Shostakovich String Quartets they’ve chosen for their first recording since 2019.

No. 3 in F major’s opening Allegretto is a case in point. Evoking the spirit of the Limoges market in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, it bounds into sound with a fabulous, crisply insouciant bounce, textures freshly lucid, and retaining sunniness even where it would be easy to let Shostakovichian sarcastic bite to nudge its way in. As for that aforementioned blending, just listen to the tonal matching between the two violins midway through the final Moderato. Also the sheer sweetness and slender finesse of the first violin’s reprisal of the theme.

Still, gut-wrenching pain and biting irony are also a part of the Shostakovich package, and these readings offer more of a mixed bag of satisfaction on that front. Sticking with No. 3 (which was written in 1945 as a portrayal of both the joys and the sorrows of the Russian people), its hushed, despairing final fade is articulated here as a whisper of heartrending fragility. Earlier though, while its Allegro moderato is impressively neatly prickly, it’s missing a bit of the rawness that some listeners will be wanting from a movement depicting the harshness of daily life in one of Russia’s darkest periods in history.

On to self-quotation-filled Quartet No. 8 in C minor – famously written in over three days in 1960 as Shostakovich visited the bombed remains of Dresden, and dedicated to “the victims of fascism and the war” – and while the keening anger of its Allegro molto offsets any vaguely perceived lack of violence, the Allegretto and Largo feel slightly unsatisfyingly perfect and classically beautiful to truly hit their mark. That said, it’s impossible not to find oneself lapping up the sheer finesse and beauty the Novus has brought to this music.