Notes from the 2025 Salzburg Festival ( 5 )
Cuarteto Casals in Shostakovich
Salzburg Festival • Chamber Music • Cuarteto Casals
Also published in Die Presse: Serenade zum Todestag von Schostakowitsch: Cuarteto Casals in Salzburg
Death Becomes them: Shostakovich Quartets in Salzburg
The Cuarteto Casals scored with dark sonority rather than hard edges in their DSCH-dedicated chamber music recital
Monday evening at the Salzburg Festival brought another birthday serenade for Shostakovich’s 50th death anniversary at the Mozarteum Hall – from the Cuarteto Casals. They promised three string quartets. Only three? After all, the Mandelring Quartet (CD reviews here, here, and here) still played all 15 quartets at the Festival back in 2011! (Reviewed on ionarts here.) But one doesn't want to be immoderate, and with Quartets 1, 8, and 15 – i.e. the first, last, and most famous – the selection was promising enough.
All the more so since there are no “early” string quartets with DSCH: When the 32-year-old Shostakovich took his first crack at the genre, with op.49, he was already an experienced composer with one suppressed and four performed symphonies plus two operas under his belt. The Lady Macbeth scandal that had brought him to the edge of the Gulag, and the ‘resurrection’ thanks to the Fifth Symphony, lay behind him. It should not surprise, then, that this first quartet is immediately a masterwork – as if it had sprung, Pallas-Athena-like, from Zeus’s head.
Right away, the Cuarteto Casals’ gloriously solid, perpetually beautiful, expressive sound – from top to bottom, first violin to cello – makes quite an impression. Cellist Arnau Tomàs (check out his Bach!!!) handled his part with resonant, bearish authority. Wonderful, the woody, round-cheeked timbre of Cristina Cordero’s viola. Fascinating the mediating work of second violinist Abel Tomàs. And fitting excellently into the picture: the dark-timbred first violin of Vera Martínez Mehner. One doesn’t miss the rougher approach that has a long tradition in these works at all, because the Spanish quartet’s lyricism, while luxurious, never seems superficial. Nor did it ever feel like the quartet was rounding the edges too much – a criticism that might be (though it doesn’t have to be) made of the Mandelrings. Small and infrequent intonation wobbles couldn’t distract amidst the astonishment over the sound.
That the Eighth Quartet is so much better known than the others does, in a way, surprise, since they all seem equally good. Or more evenly superb than the symphonies, anyway. On the other hand, it doesn’t take much to make the difference between hit and rarity, icon and footnote. (Are, for example, Mozart’s symphonies really as much better than those of Vanhal and Mysliveček as the fame gradient would have us believe?) But perhaps it’s also the dark vein of op.110 – so fitting the clichéd image of DSCH – that fascinates us, seeing that it appears to reflect the composer’s suffering and disguised resistance in Soviet terror…
And it was melancholy-gripping, what the Cuarteto Casals – currently recording all the quartets for Harmonia Mundi (see the Shostakovich String Quartet Survey) – delivered. “If his 15 symphonies are, according to the composer, ‘gravestones’”, writes Robert Reilly in Surprised by Beauty, “then the quartets are the flowers he lays on the graves.” The Cuarteto Casals’ tone – sadly beautiful and mellow – suits this poetry of suffering well.
One could title the six slow, relentless, embittered movements of op.144 with: “The Six Last Words of the Survivor”. Even more so than with Haydn, this deceleration on Shostakovich’s part is a gutsy, deliberate, and pointed imposition on the listener. The interpreters’ long lines made concentration easy, though, thanks to the unremitting inner tension amid this sustained slowness, and the pinch of Haydnesque mischief. The encore from the Third String Quartet, meanwhile, was merciless and had a symphonic earthiness about it. Fabulous, all, and very promising as far as their recordings are concerned.
Vera Martínez Mehner (Violine), Abel Tomàs (Violine), Arnau Tomàs (Violoncello), Cristina Cordero (Viola). SF / Marco Borrelli
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