Janine Jansen, Irène Duval, Blythe Teh Engstroem, Lawrence Power, Daniel Blendulf, and Steven Isserlis perform Shostakovich and Schubert

The program opens with Jansen, Duval, Power, and Isserlis in Shostakovich's magnificent String Quartet No. 3, composed shortly after the end of World War II. This work in five movements evokes the USSR from the 1930s through the end of a world-altering conflict: life before wartime, rising international tensions, the war and the state of shock left in its aftermath, and then the return to something like normalcy. As always, Shostakovich imbues this music with contrasting sentiments: the first movement's levity and second movement's tragedy meet in the third's chilling irony and the final movement's ineluctable melancholy. After the interval, Jansen, Duval, Teh Engstroem, Isserlis, and Blendulf move on to Schubert's String Quintet in C, somber and grandiose, almost orchestral in the scope of its sound.

Photo © DR
medici.tv’s broadcasts of the Verbier Festival's 30th anniversary edition are produced with the support of Madame Aline Foriel-Destezet.
Janine Jansen appears courtesy of Decca Classics.