Quartet Gerhard, Shostakovitch's Complete String Quartets

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Image courtesy of Festival de Torroella de Montgrí

From his first string quartet, written in 1938, to the last, the fifteenth, composed in 1974, a year before his death, Dmitri Shostakovitch wrote one of the most extensive and significant series of string quartets of the 20th century. They are the sincere testimony of a life that the composer could not capture in his symphonies, which he was forced to write following the political guidelines of the Soviet Union.

It is in the quartets where Shostakovich gives expression to his ideas in a music full of contrasts, in which we find joy and anguish, tenderness and violence, folk melodies and modernism. His whole life is in these 15 quartets, which the Quartet Gerhard started to perform last summer at the Torroella Festival with two concerts. This year, they continue with two more concerts, and will complete them at the 2024 Festival.

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