Valentin Berlinsky QuartetAvie AV 2253 ****

Shostakovich completed his Seventh Quartet in March 1960, dedicating it to the memory of his first wife, who would have turned 50 in 1959. It's been claimed that he planned his Eighth Quartet, written in Dresden in July 1960 "in memory of the victims of fascism and war" and full of self-quotations, to be his final work, as he was planning suicide, allegedly in the face of his imminent membership of the Communist Party. The Eighth Quartet became an instant classic. The much shorter, and more enigmatic Seventh has always remained in its shadow. The Valentin Berlinsky Quartet, named after the cellist of the Borodin Quartet, play both works with a rewarding intensity of focus that achieves its goals without ever seeming to force an issue. Their playing of the first of Beethoven's Rasumovsky Quartets is almost as good. url.ie/e8oo