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Pacifica Quartet Shosktakovich Cycle

Garlanded with awards and admired for the range of its repertoire, the Pacifica Quartet is renowned in concert halls throughout the world for its exuberant performance style in music ranging from Mendelssohn and Janácek to its recorded cycle of the quartets of Elliott Carter. On 10 October the quartet launches its survey of Shostakovich's string quartets at Wigmore Hall with the first of three concerts this month, to be complemented by a further three next March.

Shostakovich's cycle of 15 symphonies has increasingly been recognised as the natural 20th-century successor to the epic symphonies of Mahler; he also completed 15 string quartets but these were only begun towards the middle of his career, after he had endured humiliation at the hands of Stalin and experienced the horrors of war and siege, during which he managed the extraordinary feat of emerging as popular hero and musical spokesman.

The quartets retrospectively cast a light on many of these turbulent events and they inexorably move into a shadowy world of nightmare and desolation. In this sense they mirror the 20th-century’s decline with uncanny realism.