Quatuor Danel [Marc Danel & Gilles Millet (violins), Vlad Bogdanas (viola), Yovan Markovitch (cello)]
Weinberg String Quartet no.14 in B flat minor Op.122 (1978)
Weinberg String Quartet no.15 in G flat major Op.124 (1979-80)
Shostakovich String Quartet no.14 in F sharp major Op.142 (1972-3)
Wigmore Hall, London
Tuesday 6 May 2025
by Richard Whitehouse Photo (c) Marco Borggreve
Quatuor Danel’s interrelated cycle of string quartets by Shostakovich and Weinberg reached its penultimate stage this evening, and a programme with two of the latter composer’s most oblique such pieces heard alongside what is the most accessible of the former’s late quartets.
Second in a quartet of quartets written in the years after Shostakovich’s death, Weinberg’s Fourteenth Quartet continues straight from the sombre equivocation of its predecessor. Its five continuous movements never progress systematically as lurch forwards from an edgily austere first movement, by way of a moodily impassive successor, then on to a scherzo and intermezzo that are not so much elusive as gnomic in character; prior to a finale where any attempt at overall synthesis gradually subsides to leave only the wanly resigned conclusion. An ending, moreover, whose fatalism feels the more dismaying as it withdraws into virtual silence, as if Weinberg’s self-communing may well be a defence or even escape. As with its successor, his replacing tempo headings with metronome markings only abets obfuscation.
The Fifteenth Quartet might appear relatively less stark in outcome yet is certainly the most radical of all these works in formal design. Its nine mainly brief movements are interpretable in various ways – but a speculative sonata design is implied by the aggressive ‘development’ of the central three movements as framed by respectively angular and thrusting ‘transitions’; surrounded in turn by a two-stage ‘exposition’ of almost secretive inwardness which is itself balanced by a ‘reprise’ whose incrementally more direct expression facilitates that eventual, albeit tenuous sense of closure. Other approaches are entirely plausible, though there was an undeniable culmination imparted to those middle movements as the Danel steered its secure course through this fascinating if always disconcerting instance of Weinberg’s later maturity.
After such obliquities, the seeming directness of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Quartet was the more affecting, though nothing should be taken at face value at this stage of its composer’s creativity. Allusions to earlier works (his own and others) abound and while the presence of serial elements is reduced next to its predecessors, sparsity of texture ensures a distanced or remote feeling even when this music is at its most active. As is true for most of the opening Allegretto, its lilting poise increasingly fitful as it nears a regretful if still inquisitive close.
By contrast, the central Adagio finds this composer at his most inward and confessional; its content allotted for much of its course to first violin and cello, so affording an austerity into which the eloquence of the ‘Angel Serenade’ by Gaetano Braga is a reminder Shostakovich was at time considering an operatic treatment of Chekhov’s story The Black Monk. The final Allegretto initially brings a more impetuous discourse, but this elides seamlessly into a coda whose pale radiance essentializes the work’s home key in a leave-taking of acute poignancy.
As always, the Danel gave its collective both here and in those miniatures which served as a welcome encore: two pieces from Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives, arranged for string quartet by Sergey Samsonov with a sensitivity for those piano originals as was nothing if not idiomatic.
You can hear the music from the concert below, in recordings made by Quatuor Danel -including their most recent cycle of the Shostakovich quartets on Accentus:
For more information on the final concert in the series, visit the Wigmore Hall website. You can click on the names for more on composer Mieczysław Weinberg and Quatuor Danel themselves.
Published post no.2,528 – Friday 9 May 2025
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