Following the series devoted to Korngold's string quartets, here is the first instalment in a new project by Alma Quartet and Challenge Classics. In five CDs the Alma Quartet will bring out the late string quartet output by Beethoven and Shostakovich. Each volume will couple a late quartet by the two composers, who shared a "late style" in this medium.

As much as the now popular sentence naming Shostakovich "the Beethoven of the 20th century" is debatable, nobody can deny an amount of contact points between the two composers: above all, the favourite musical mediums and the engagement in historical and political coeval affairs. However, we think that nothing like their Late String Quartets can offer material for a comparative listening and analysis. In both cases we can easily detect what Edward Said defined and discussed as the "Late Style". And in both cases we are in front of a complex and vibrant dialectic between a process of abstraction and a moral imperative to stick to the "hic et nunc". Such an intellectual and existential confrontation is fruitfully without solution and offers a never-ending space to insights and interpretations. Here we propose Alma Quartet's outlook first instalment.