String Quartet No. 10

Dedication: “To Moisei Samuilovich Vainberg”
Duration: 22’

String Quartet No.10
A-flat major
op.118

I. Andante
II. Allegro furioso
III. Adagio
IV. Allegretto

   Shostakovich began work on the Tenth Quartet on 9 July 1964, not quite six weeks after completing his previous work, the Ninth Quartet, Op. 117. Perhaps the desire to add another quartet to his portfolio was at least in part due to the spirit of friendly competition with his close friend Moisei Weinberg (Mieczysław Wajnberg), who had by that time composed nine quartets. The work was composed at the House of Composers near Dilizhan (Armenia) and was completed on 20 July. It is dedicated to “Moisei Samuilovich Weinberg”.
   The quartet has four movements: Andante; Allegretto furioso; Adagio; Allegretto[-Andante]. The third movement transitions into the fourth without a rest (attacca). As in the Ninth Quartet, Shostakovich summarises his vast experience as a master of large-scale instrumental form rather than looks for new ways. Like almost all of the preceding quartets, apart from the First and Eighth, the Tenth is a “finale cycle”: the centre of gravity in all of these works lies in the final movement, which is the largest in terms of size, rich in contrasts and, as a rule, synthesises the thematic content of the other movements.
   The Tenth Quartet, as all the preceding quartets by Shostakovich apart from the First, was premiered in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on 20 November 1964 by the Beethoven Quartet.
   The first recording of the Tenth Quartet on an LP was made on the night of 7 February 1965 under the supervision of Melodiya’s record producer Igor Veprintsev.
   The Tenth is one of Shostakovich’s five quartets arranged for chamber orchestra by Rudolf Barshai, referred to in Barshai’s version as “Chamber Symphonies”. The transcription of the Tenth Quartet for string orchestra, designated as Op. 118a, was first performed by the Moscow Chamber Orchestra under Barshai in Moscow no later than 1967.
   The period in Shostakovich’s biography between the Thirteenth (1962) and Fourteenth (1969) symphonies, to which the Tenth String Quartet belongs, was marked by his search for new opportunities to enrich his musical language, in particular by moving towards twelve-tone writing as in passages comprising all the notes of the chromatic scale (development in this direction would soon lead the composer to real twelve-tone rows).
   The fact that contemporaries regarded the Tenth Quartet as another example of Shostakovich’s familiar manner, and perhaps not the most vivid one, is confirmed by lines from a monograph by Sofya Khentova dedicated to this musical work: “The dramatic style becomes inwardly relaxed... The style softens and even becomes simplified. The intonation structure becomes stabilised.”
   In terms of both its smaller and more ambitious pieces of that time, the Tenth Quartet can be said to follow tried and tested models. For his subsequent quartets (Nos. 11-13 and 15), Shostakovich will find entirely new compositional solutions.