About fifteen years ago, when I was engaged in writing a book about Shostakovich’s quartets, I interviewed one of the Emerson Quartet violinists, Eugene Drucker, about the intense impact those works had on the audience. “When we put a Shostakovich quartet on a mixed program,” he told me, “no matter whether we put it before the intermission or at the end, when people come backstage, what they want to talk about is the Shostakovich. This happens even if we’re also playing something equally great, like Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden.’” What struck me at the time, and what I emphasized in my book, was how emotionally powerful the Shostakovich quartets evidently were. Still, over the years I found myself imagining the thrill of listening to two such amazing pieces—the Schubert and, say, Shostakovich’s Eighth—in a single concert. How great would that be?
So my Pavlovian response, when these very pieces appeared on a CMS program last Friday, was instantly to grab tickets. I had no prior acquaintance with the Quartetto di Cremona, the featured group, but their reputation was good, so I figured it wasn’t much of a risk. And the addition of a single brief contemporary work to the program—Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae for String Quartet—also suited me, since I figured that the congenially harmonic Golijov would offer a nice appetizer to the two meatier works. I do not mean to demean Golijov by saying this: his 2002 piece, though offering its own distinct pleasures, could never have aspired to reach the depths of the other two. But then, practically nothing written for string quartet, whether in this century or in Shostakovich’s or Schubert’s, would have stood up to that competition.
The Quartetto di Cremona’s ordering of the program—first the twenty-minute Shostakovich, next the twelve-minute Golijov, and then, after the intermission, the forty-minute Schubert—made sense in terms of timing, but it struck me as slightly perverse. With my innate bias toward Shostakovich, I expected to like the Eighth Quartet the best and to feel that everything went downhill after that. Talking to my friends at the intermission, I was still vociferously defending my Russian favorite and wondering why he couldn’t have appeared last. His emphatic, severely anxious, but also consciously self-dramatizing despair (embodied in both the strong three-beat “knocks” and his relentless repetition of the D-S-C-H theme) combined with shreds of his innate wit (those dance-of-death triplets in the middle section, for instance) to make his 1960 quartet a searing experience that was bound to burn up everything else in its vicinity. I also commented that the Italians seemed a somber group. Their playing, I agreed, was terrific, but their faces never cracked the slightest glimmer of smile, even during the uproarious applause.
As it turned out, I had to eat all those words in the second half. Never have I heard Schubert’s Fourteenth Quartet played better. In fact, never have I heard any Schubert quartet played better than this one was done by the Quartetto di Cremona on Friday, March 8, at Alice Tully Hall. It was not that the Shostakovich faded away; I was glad to have heard it live, as I am always glad whenever it appears in my life. But the Quartetto’s rendering of the Schubert was so intense, so varied, so vigorous and yet so attentive to nuance, as to leave me stunned.
My first glimmerings of how great it would be appeared as early as the opening Allegro, when I watched the face of the first violinist, Cristiano Gualco, and saw the edges of his mouth tugging upward in an involuntary smile. Gualco was facing my direction, so I couldn’t see the other countenances as clearly, but it was obvious from their playing that Paolo Andreaoli, Simone Gramaglia, and Giovanni Scaglione had also reached the moment they were waiting for. They loved this quartet. They treasured its every move from speed to slowness, loud voices to soft ones; they savored every repetition with a difference. In the course of their emphatic bowings, they lost horsehairs all over the stage, but nothing could stop the onward flow. It was as if they had been born to play this music. It spoke to them, and through it they spoke to us.
At the quiet, solemn end of the Shostakovich, the four players had held their final position, still and silent, for a noticeably lengthy time before they lowered their arms and allowed us to applaud; this is what the Eighth Quartet demands, and they were listening to it. But when they reached the close of the Schubert’s final Presto segment, they threw up their arms in joy, and we responded accordingly. If I had been invited backstage afterward (and Gramaglia’s charming introduction to the Puccini encore made me wish I had been), it was the Schubert I would have wanted to talk about.