Reminder: There are still two concerts left in the St. Petersburg Quartet's historic Shostakovich-Beethoven cycle in Brooklyn

The St. Petersburg Quartet: unflappably poised and probing founding first violinist Alla Aranovskaya, violist Boris Vayner (with the quartet since 2005, and an ear-opener in last night's performance of the Shostakovich 13th Quartet), rock-solid founding cellist Leonid Shukayev, and a shorter-haired version of unreasonably adorable second violinist Evgeny Zvonnikov (with the quartet since 2010). Last night's concert was "one of the great concerts of my (alarmingly long) concertgoing experience."

by Ken

I should have tried harder to squeeze into yesterday's schedule a reminder about the weekend event I previewed last weekend: the second half of the St. Petersburg String Quartet's six-concert series of the complete Shostakovich quartets accompanied by selected mid-to-late Beethoven quartets. Obviously my regular 6pm PT post would have been too late to remind anyone about last night's concert, so I put off any reminder to today. And then, instead of writing this post for the 10am PT slot, I opted instead for more fulminating on the right-wing hooligans now running amok in the nation's statehouses and in the U.S. House of Representatives. Like my fulminating is going to do anything about it!

In the event that my I thereby deprived anyone of the opportunity to get to last night's concert, or of the time to plan to attend tonight's, which features one of the more attractive-looking programs, I apologize, because last night's was one of the great concerts of my (alarmingly long) concertgoing experience. I'm inclined now to take off the hypotheticals and question marks I've been using in describing the St. Petersburg as possibly the foremost string quartet before the public today. Not only do I know of no current quartet that can do what these folks did last night, but I don't know of any quartet of any era that could have surpassed it.

I really enjoyed the two concerts I attended out of the first three, January 21-23. (I missed the Friday night but got to the Saturday night and Sunday afternoon.) But I'm not sure the quartet was necessarily at its very best. For one thing, it was frigidly cold. At Bargemusic, on Brooklyn's East River waterfront at Fulton Ferry Landing, you really are on a real live barge in the East River, with windows on the performers' end opening onto the lower Manhattan skyline. Even though the barge itself seemed gratifyingly well heated, I'm not sure how warm it was at the performers' windowed end, and getting there through the deep freeze can't have been easy on either body or mind. And I can't say that the audience turnout was exactly overwhelming, especially when you consider the stature of these performers. (Is this what happens, even in the supposedly aesthetically sensitive classical-music world, when you don't have a high-powered PR machine behind you? I suspect so.)

Of course it may be that my concentration too was off, but in any case, admirable as all of the performances were, I at least didn't feel totally engaged until the final work on each of the programs I heard: the glorious Shostakovich Third Quartet on Saturday, Beethoven's Op. 59, No. 3 on Sunday. Last night, however, I felt gripped from the opening bars of another of my most-loved quartets, the Shostakovich Sixth (one of the pieces we previewed and heard in its entirety last Sunday), and that concentration and intensity remained unflagging through four exceedingly concentrated and intense works. The St. Petersburg not only got full artistic value for all four but made several of them sound approachable in a way I've never experienced before.

I have to say, for example, that I've never quite been on board with the widespread popularity of the Shostakovich Eighth Quartet, which for a lot of music-lovers has been the one Shostakovich quartet they knew. And it's not because the work seems to me "too easy," as often happens when there's one work out of bunch singled out for popularity. Much as I've respected the piece, with its rather gnarly, contentious quality it has always seemed to me a harder sell than any number of other Shostakovich quartets, like the Third and Sixth, and maybe the First and Second and Ninth. But last night the St. Petersburg set the piece out in a way that made it overwhelmingly gripping and moving for me, and left me eager to go back and listen to it some more.

The same was true of the relatively short 13th Quartet (roughly 20 minutes), which has generally seemed to me a beautiful but unwelcomingly wintry piece. Without flinching at its melancholy depths, the St. Petersburg made the whole piece emotionally gripping, with a generous assist from a secret weapon: current violist Boris Vayner.

The Shostakovich 13th Quartet is dedicated to Vadim Borisovsky, the original violist of the Beethoven Quartet, with which the composer had a close bond -- inexplicably close to me, in that I've never gotten much of a message from the Beethoven Quartet's records over a long period of time. Nevertheless, Shostakovich eventually devoted a quartet to each of the four original members, and not surprisingly there embedded special "prizes" for the dedicatees. The 13th Quartet has some simply haunting viola solos, which must be a dream for the player to play, but they also carry a lot of pressure: not just that they're extremely exposed, but that they require the player to deliver. I certainly had no complaints about Vayner's utterly musical playing in the first two and a half concerts I heard, but in the Shostakovich 13th he floored me. Credit the composer with creating those opportunities, but it's up to the performer to deliver, and did Vayner ever!

From the St. Petersburg's Dec. 2000- Jan. 2001 recording of the Shostakovich 13th Quartet, the final minutes are played by violist Alexei Koptev and cellist Leonid Shukayev with violinists Alla Aranovskaya and Ilya Teplyakov.

I have to say that the St. Petersburg has shown excellent taste in violists. In their Shostakovich recordings we had the pleasure of encountering three violists: Andrei Dogadin, Konstantin Kats, and Alexei Koptev, all first-rate. I'm very curious now to go back to the recording of the 13th Quartet, with Koptev. I suspect it's going to give me more pleasure than ever before, because in the cases of both the Eighth Quartet, a piece I've heard a lot, and the 13th, a piece I've heard a fair amount, last night's performances taught me an enormous amount about how to listen to them. (I just noticed, by the way, that Hyperion has gathered the St. Petersburg Shostakovich quartet cycle, including the Piano Trio and Piano Quintet, which I've described repeatedly as one of the great projects in recording history, and which I labored to collect in single-disc form, in a handy box.)

Coming off the haunting intensity of the St. Petersburg's Shostakovich 13th Quartet, not just violist Vayner but the whole quartet seemed to find i Beethoven's Op. 95 something of a cleansing release. For Beethoven the "little" Op. 95 -- it's conspicuously more compact than the earlier "middle" Beethoven quartets, the three of Op. 59 and the majestic "Harp," Op. 74 -- seems to have been an exercise in "writing small." But Beethoven wasn't much for "thinking small," and those nestled smaller works in all media tend to be not so much shorter as more concentrated and focused than their more expansive brethren. Op. 95 is a protean, constantly evolving piece that evokes none other than Shostakovich; it occurred to me that Shostakovich must have taken it very much to heart. The fast tempos of the outer movements were bracing without being excessive, and in slower motion the St. Petersburg players seemed simply to glow. While loving the Beethoven performance, I kept wondering whether it would have had quite this level of physical energy if it hadn't come right after the Shostakovich 13th.

It will be fascinating tonight to hear the St. Petersburg tackle Beethoven's next quartet, the E-flat major, Op. 127, written after a quartet hiatus of more than a decade and jumping the gap from "middle" to "late" Beethoven. It's a piece I love particularly, for its bold streak of extroversion (from the grand opening, you would never guess that we were in such a string-improbable key as E-flat major, which basically nullifies the vibrant sound of the instruments' open strings). Also on tonight's program is the searingly beautiful 14th Quartet, the other work we previewed last Sunday, and the Tenth Quartet. Tomorrow afternoon we hear three late Shostakovich quartets, Nos. 11, 12, and 15, plus Beethoven's ferociously monumental Grosse Fuge, the original finale of the quartet that followed Op. 127, Op. 130, which even the composer was persuaded was perhaps too much for both performers and listeners. (I always find it fascinating to hear the wildly differnet direction he went in in composing a replacement finale for Op. 130.)

For information about the concerts you can check the Bargemusic website. You can make reservations by e-mail, or just show up before the concert, when all ticket sales are done. Considering the caliber of the music and the performers, not to mention the chance to see them perform in this intimate and informal setting, the asking price is a steal -- and for students ($15) a downright giveaway.


The Adagio of Shostakovich's Tenth Quartet is played here by violinists Neil Gopal and Yuichiro Sakai, violist Curtis Rainey, and cellist Melanie Ellison, at Quartet Program (West) this past July. The Tenth Quartet is on tonight's St. Petersburg Quartet program at Bargemusic.

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