The final volume in a distinguished quartet cycle by one of the most exciting Italian ensembles of the present day.

Founded in 2011, Quartetto Noûs have been playing Shostakovich since their earliest concerts together, and their performances, both in concert and on record, bear the mark of both deep study and complete identification with the scores. These are risk-taking, thoroughly embedded performances, as many critics have recognised, which live up to the edgy intensity of the music itself.

The Quartetto Noûs have saved up Shostakovich’s first and final essays in the quartet genre until last. The juxtaposition is arresting, though it should be remembered that the First Quartet is not ‘early’ Shostakovich and does not share the madcap energy or prodigious brilliance of works from the composer’s teens such as the First Symphony. Indeed the smoothly wrought opening of the First Quartet, from 1938, reflects its Op.49 designation within his catalogue: this is a composer who has seen and suffered much and grasped how to translate experience into sound within tightly constructed forms.

Within the First Quartet’s four-movement, 15-minute span, there is all the same no shortage of his mordant wit and his poker face. Such qualities still define the profile of the last three quartets, from the very end of the composer’s life. By this point his health was poor and his movement restricted.

The economy of means is as remarkable as the huge emotional terrain covered by these works. The instrumental scream at the end of the 13th Quartet is as bleak and terrifying as anything in 20th-century music.

The 14th is a final and supreme example of Shostakovich the black humorist in the tradition of Mussorgsky, while the 15th belies its form of six slow movements with the sharpest of pens; he retained a genius for telling a story and crafting a melody even when using fewer notes than ever.