Mandelring Quartett - Shostakovich: Complete String String Quartets Vol. 5 (2009) [SACD]

The Mandelring cycle on Audite was the first (and remains, as of late 2018, the only) set on SACD. It is among the very best sounding cycles, even on the Red-Book CD layer. To quote from the recommendation in Surprised by Beauty: “The Mandelring Quartett are Shostakovich-seducers, not Shostakovich-enforcers and they bring out the sheer beauty of all of Shostakovich’s brilliantly harrowing ugliness. Three of its four members are siblings and the fourth plays as if he were a family member. They perform as if these quartets were taking place inside a single soul, achieving an extraordinary quality of interiority and unanimity. Accentuating surfaces more than spikes, corners, and gore, their rhythmic beat is propulsive but rarely maniacal and their splendid sound matches that of the recording: a perfect foil to more fervent, rougher interpretations.”
Jens F. Laurson – musicweb-international.com
With Vol.V the Mandelring Quartett completes the fifteen string quartets of Shostakovich. Highly praised in the press as one of the outstanding complete editions of our time, the last volume presents the Quartets Nos. 11, 13 and 15. The Eleventh Quartet received its premiere in the former Leningrad at the preliminary celebrations of the composer’s 60th birthday. During the very same night, the composer suffered a serious heart attack which changed his life and way of thinking. This 1966 quartet was dedicated to the late violinist of the Beethoven Quartet, an ensemble with which the composer was intimately acquainted, appears as a multi-movement suite in which character pieces such as the “Etude” and the “Humoresque” turn up – with a grim, cynical humour, of course.The 13th Quartet composed in 1970 is dedicated to the violist of the Beethoven Quartet and is a portrait, in a single monumental movement, of this instrument that Shostakovich loved so much. In the final, 15th Quartet (1974), the composer finally seizes upon a radical formal solution: six Adagio movements come together to form a large work of mourning which bears no more dedication… With Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets the Mandelring Quartett presents a quartet cycle, which in its entirety probably represents the most important corpus of string quartets of the 20th century.