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Shostakovich Quartet No. 6 in G Major, Opus 101
Shostakovich’s sudden re-marriage in the summer of 1956 caught even his closest friends by surprise. His first wife, the physicist Nina Varzar, had died suddenly in December 1954, and eighteen months later the shy composer impulsively proposed to a pretty young party official, Margarita Kainova. She just as impulsively accepted, and they were married in…
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Shostakovich Quartet No. 5 in B-flat Major, Opus 92
Shostakovich wrote his Fifth String Quartet in the fall of 1952, but it remained in manuscript, unperformed, for over a year—and for very good reasons. Not only were these some of the darkest years of the Cold War, they were also the paranoid final years of Stalin’s repressive regime. Four years earlier, at the 1948…
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Looking ahead to March 2017
The Alexander String Quartet is looking ahead to a busy March schedule filled with exciting performances from coast-to-coast! Saturday March 4, 2017 10:00 am Shostakovich String Quartet Cycle San Francisco Performances Inc. Herbst Theatre San Francisco, CaliforniaTel: (415) 398-6449 Web: performances.org Program: ASQ with lecturer, Robert Greenberg Shostakovich Quartet No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op.…
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Shostakovich Quartet No. 4 in D Major, Opus 83
The Soviet crackdown on composers in February 1948 remains, over half a century later, one of the most devastating examples of government interference and censorship in history. Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Miaskovsky, and others were excoriated for their “formalistic distortions and anti-democratic tendencies” and for writing “confused, neuropathological combinations which transform music into cacophony.” These composers…
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Shostakovich Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Opus 73
The Third String Quartet was Shostakovich’s only composition during the year 1946. He dedicated it to the members of the Beethoven Quartet, who gave the first performance in Moscow on their namesake’s 176th birthday, December 16, 1946. The mention of Beethoven is apt, for many observers have felt that this quartet, particularly in its heartfelt…
