PERSPECTIVE — Playing all 15 of Dmitri Shostakovich’s string quartets over five concerts is the Jerusalem Quartet’s trademark. This season, the highlight of the ensemble’s national tour is a complete Shostakovich cycle played in chronological order, presented at the Cleveland Museum of Art by the Cleveland Chamber Music Society April 21-30 to conclude its 75th anniversary season.
But this will not be the early-middle-late journey typical of Beethoven. Shostakovich didn’t begin writing string quartets until 1938, well into his maturity and after the Stalin crackdown on his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Quartets arrived with increasing frequency as the composer entered his final years, with a range of expression so wide as to suggest he was a case of multiple compositional personalities. He could be preemptively ducking the Soviet criticism that dogged his symphonies. Or, thinking that the coast was clear, he wrote what he wanted, running the gamut from saturated Debussy-like harmonies to graphic, spare, enigmatic effects intermittently spiced with Russian folk elements and strong Jewish influences. Shostakovich defined the Soviet-era world as much as it defined him, resonating well past his death in 1975.
Now, generalities about Shostakovich quartets can be so easily contradicted because the composer tried out a little bit of everything. His 1968 Quartet No. 12, for example, uses 12-tone elements in the opening bars. But if anybody can risk such observations, it’s cellist Kyril Zlotnikov, a founding member of the Israel-based Jerusalem Quartet, which has played Shostakovich extensively in the 30 years since its debut. Here is his view from the stage.
Stearns: Is any music in the standard repertoire as elusive as the Shostakovich string quartets? Some musicians say they don’t look like much on the page. Then you start to play them, and many different stories unfold.
Zlotnikov: There are many traps in this music. You have happy music that’s sad and painful. And vice versa. You need to find and show the layers. There is so much in the quartets…pain and hope and sarcasm and irony. It’s an endless search. This is the third time we’ve come back to the cycle, and every quartet is such a different world.
Stearns: What’s the case to be made for performing an entire Shostakovich cycle?
Zlotnikov: It’s not easy music. But we’ve found that a lot of people when, for example, they hear Bartók surrounded by Haydn and Schubert, it’s tough to hear Bartók. But when audiences are given the whole experience [of a complete cycle], doors open to Bartók and Shostakovich.
Stearns: I’ve often felt the string quartets have to be played by Russians to understand the music’s subtext, symbolism, and quotations of other composer’s works. What do you think?
Zlotnikov: Three founding members of quartet are originally from Russia. I was born in Minsk. We were lucky to work with teachers from the Soviet era. We heard many stories, the mentality of that time. Mostly, Russian people, they don’t smile. In schools, for example, they teach Turgenev, the story “Mumu,” about a servant who cannot speak but the woman he is working for saw that he was happy with his dog, and she made him kill the dog. This is part of the school program. Kids have to learn about these things at a rough age. It’s the character of the culture. Now it’s a little bit less, a different generation. But back then it was [living in] survival mode.
Stearns: The most famous is the Quartet No. 8, which is full of graphic effects like a pounding at the door, a quote from his long-suppressed Symphony No. 4.
Zlotnikov: And the quotations from the Lady Macbeth opera. He was always trying to cover the real meaning of what he is trying to say. It’s hard to find the right way of playing [the quartets], and it comes with playing them.
Stearns: Pinpointing how your approach has changed must be difficult. I can say, though, that your latest recording (Quartets No. 2 Op. 68, Quartet No. 7, Op. 108, and Quartet No. 10, Op. 118) feel much richer harmonically.
Zlotnikov: In this latest recording — our first for the Swedish label BIS — the producers have their personal approach to the balance of the sound. This time we recorded in a concert hall, Markus-Sittikus-Saal, Hohenems, Germany (home of the annual Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg). For Harmonia Mundi, we were mostly in the Berlin Teldec studio [where] you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere. But in the concert hall, you play toward the seats — even if there aren’t people there. You feel more comfortable to do things you want to do for the music.
Stearns: I hear a lot of Debussy in the new recording.
Zlotnikov: I never thought of Debussy. Like I said, there are so many layers of color and atmosphere. And everybody hears what they hear.
Stearns: Shostakovich was not Jewish, but he was in love with Jewish music and, despite rampant anti-Semitism, used it whenever he could. What does this mean to you?
Zlotnikov: It was a dangerous time, and he was so great to put a lot of Jewish motifs into his music. The way he wrote… it was so integral to the music…as though it was from himself. It plays a huge part of his music in spite of being under criticism. He was also fighting for Jewish people and Jewish rights.
Stearns: Your concerts tend to attract protests against the Israel-Gaza war.
Zlotnikov: We’re an easy target. If we had a different name — like Quartet Cantabile — people would not come to our concert to protest. Often there are protesters outside with flags and signs. But especially in Europe, people are organized, buy tickets, stand up, scream, and try to sabotage the concert. It’s really tiring and frustrating and not something I want to speak about much. The first [instance] was a really big disruption at the Edinburgh Festival years ago. It was shocking. I almost had a heart attack. Unfortunately, we’ve gotten used to this… But they [the protesters] give us so much publicity… from people who don’t normally write about classical music. We try to find the positive things within.
