Katharsisdrill recommend - 2 string quartets of Shostakovich

Today is the day of the inauguration of the new US President. I haven't really followed the whole circus - I am sure that we will have all the circus we can take for the next four years. Instead I have started on page 15 of Phill from GCHQ even though I normally use my Friday for other work - making a comic is is a lot of effort, but also fun and almost addictive.

Anyway... when I draw I often listen to music - and today I choose to listen to Dmitri Shostakovich - two of his fantastic late String quartets - not really for any reason. I had put on the second piano concert by Rachmaninov, but didn't really fell like it and then remembered these beautiful, but heavily melancholic, if not downright tragic pieces.

The String Quartet No 8, in C Minor, Op. 110 is written in 1960. It is composed of five movements and opens slowly and sorrowful, just to be replaced by the violent, haunted second movement. This violence recurs throughout, but ebbs out slowly in the long, beautiful fifth movement. The piece is dedicated to the victims of the second World War, and listening to this you can hear a whole continent sink into despair. Shostakovich was there for it all: the war, the post- war revelations of unimaginable atrocities, Stalin and the horrors of the totalitarian Soviet - and it is all condensed into this little piece.

After this I - reinvigorated with condensed sorrow - moved on to the somewhat longer Quartet No 15. It is composed in 1974 not long before the death of the composer. It does contain both an Elegy, a nocturne, and a funeral march, but compared to the violent sadness of the No 8 this is softer and more accepting. Still you hear throughout these works the lament of one of the most regretful periods of history, the period of the first real global war.

So listening to this I ignored all the claims of making greatness, showing others, ending agreements etc. that have filled so much these last months. Let's hope it is just words, so that nobody ever again will have to write such music.

If you are interested in this you might also appreciate this old post with 3 pieces by Toru Takemitsu