Jerusalem Quartet: Schostakowitsch I

In the organizer's words:

Jerusalem Quartet

Alexander Pavlovsky: Violin

Sergei Bresler: Violin

Ori Kam: viola

Kyril Zlotnikov: Violoncello

(Beethovenfest Residence)

Dmitri Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 1, No. 5, No. 11 and No. 12

The Israeli Jerusalem Quartet has been delighting audiences with its interpretations of Shostakovich for decades. Now it will perform all fifteen quartets: at the Beethovenfest Bonn and in the Philharmonie Köln. It begins with the first quartet from 1938 - lyrical and cheerful. The ensemble works its way through the fifth quartet, which Shostakovich only dared to publish after Stalin's death, to the jagged late works from 1966 and 1968. Shostakovich dedicated the eleventh quartet to a deceased musician friend; it seems torn and enigmatic. In the twelfth quartet, he ignored Soviet cultural guidelines and composed a bold, atonal and intricately difficult twelve-tone piece.