I do prefer this
Manhattan set to the second Borodin edition, released here on BMG, but
currently not available. The sound of the Manhattan set is perhaps the
best available -- including the recent Emerson set -- and I have come to
admire and cherish the performances projected by that vibrant, living
sound. It has been said that the Borodin capture more of the ethnic
elements in the music -- the strains of gypsy violins, of Jewish folk
music and klezmer, echoes from Tashkent -- whatever.
How can a quartet named Manhattan NOT be in tune with ethnic diversity in music?
At any rate, my admittedly western ears, hear an ensemble digging into
what is on the page, and using all they have learned from research and
conversation with other ensembles -- including members of the Borodin
Quartet. The Manhattan Quartet did not take this project lightly and
these performances reveal a devotion to the music equal to any other
ensemble.
Highly recommended.
These recordings are truly amazing - there are none better!
I have listened to many versions of these masterpieces and these
recordings, for me, best capture the emotional power and breathtaking
beauty of the music. This man wrote such music!! The players are fully
in control at all times, take extraordinary risks and succeed each time,
and have a rare ability to convey on a very personal level the intense
human dimension of these works. Listening to the Manhattans play
Shostakovich is an exciting, sometimes harrowing and always rewarding
experience. There are 15 of these pieces and they are all great. This
series of recordings allows the listener to transverse the cycle in
order, although it might be dangerous to listen to too many in a row!
They are quite intense.
Extraordinary sensitivity and intellectual passion...
The Manhattan String Quartet, known for its thoughtful interpretation of 20th-century
works, brings its best to Shostakovich. The composer's highly
intelligent, searching emotional narratives come to brilliant life; the
range of tone and color that the players coax from the strings is truly
breathtaking -- you'll hear a viola sound exactly like a clarinet, and a
violin mimic an air-raid siren. These recordings are so immediate,
vivid, and committed that they are almost unbearable at times --
Shostakovich's pain and loss, his incredible ability to convey through
sound the despair and death of the human spirit in captivity -- these
challenging emotions are brought out with exquisite nuance and a
matchless sense of coherence.
Manhattan SQ plays Shostakovich: Top-notch, musical, intense...
It has taken some time in a new
millennium to begin to be able to see
Shostakovich' music more clearly overall, since none of these 15 string
quartets is particularly easy to play, let alone to program in live
concerts. It used to be that hearing one was something of a genuine
rarity, outside Russia itself, where groups like the legendary Beethoven
Quartet, or the earlier Borodin Quartet, were known for their advocacy
of ... and devotion to ... Dimitri Shostakovich. Of course, to play
these quartets in the Russia/USSR of their days was something of a
dangerous stand to take. Shostakovich went in and out of political
favor, especially with Joseph Stalin at the helm; yet DS kept writing
music. By the turn of the century, more and more subsequent generations
of chamber quartet string players had studied and performed these works.
It is common now to admit that all of these fifteen string quartets by
Shostakovich are among the very greatest to have been written in the
twentieth century. Right up there, are these intense, yet quirky, gems
of string writing. Some critics readily rank them at the same level of
humanity of vision and technical innovation as the six famous string
quartets by that other great Slav, Bela Bartok. Like the Bartok, these
quartets are not for easy listening, or for background music use.
Instead, each narrates something less than obvious, yet something
profoundly human .... all connoting that there are bad things going bump
in the night, all very much of a piece with in the horrendous cultural
achievements which have accompanied the shining scientific advances of
their century: giant world wars, crushing world poverty, complicated
environmental degradation, famines, genocidal death campaigns, and
nuclear or biological warfare. Still, those Shostakovich performances
which only go for the nightmare brilliance that occurs in this music
.... like the unremittingly fierce renderings of the Emerson String
Quartet ... have always left me put off from the music and somewhat
exhausted. Other recordings, like the cycle done by the Fitzwilliam,
achieve great elegance and polish, yet somehow seem to end up by putting
a scrim between me and the music's narratives. Happily, this cycle by
the Manhattan String Quartet manages to stand, right at the powerful
intersection of all those other approaches. The whole cycle just lets
Shostakovich be himself. No player in the Manhattan needs to take a back
seat to anybody else when it comes to polish, accurate intonation, or
elegance of attack or of phrasing. But, also, the Manhattan Quartet can
be fierce, burning with dark, fevered heats; edgy with lightening
flashes when the music goes there .... but just not all the time, all
the way through. Stretches of nostalgia, of energy or respose emerge
like the lyrical or jaunty episodes of daily life that they no doubt
were, before Shostakovich wrote them into this music. The Manhattan
balances inhabit and express alive, changing moments along those
continuums of interpretation where other players have staked out more
extreme, and therefore to me more mannered, positions. Even more
important, the Manhattan players manage through tone, phrasing, and
their own varied internal balances ... to suggest that even when things
are going well at the moment, some anguish or terror is still waiting in
the darkness, just over there, not necessarily very far off. Happiness
does not make us safe, Shostakovich seems to be saying. Neither does our
tenuous safety arise from lots of other good things which we ordinarily
assess as the good side of life that makes the bad side bearable. Thus,
from their position astride, and amid the dynamic cores of such complex
musical balancing and musical integration; I would argue that the
Manhattan Quartet manage to allow those intangible spiritual dimensions
which possibly unfold in the music to emerge intact. What are we to do?
How can we continue to live? Acknowledging and expressing all the other,
what is this, my life? These are questions that it would seem frame the
very human life that Shostakovich knew and named, musically. Well, it
will surprise no reader by now: I am ready to nominate this particular
cycle of the fifteen quartets for Top Prizes. Also helpful to the
unacquainted is the fact that the fifteen are recorded straight through
in their order. You start with the first, and end with the fifteenth,
having traveled through each one. Thus, you can begin to sense the
immense size of the journey the composer has taken, in all. Highly
recommended, then: Fifteen Stars, shining bright in the forest of the
night. Like William Blake's poetry, Shostakovich is hardly ever as
obvious or simple as some passing moments may appear. Like Blake,
Shostakovich only glows with greater and greater humanity of suffering
heart, the better acquainted you get. If you buy them, you will listen.
If you listen, you will understand.
