Bantry's Russian experiment

The Borodin Quartet's cycle of the Shostakovich string quartets is being given at Bantry House in groups of three. So it was on Monday, that the Fourth Quartet was reached. This is the first of the quartets to be written after the composer had been dragged into the firing line in an official Soviet attack on "formalism" in 1948.

The humiliation was public and deep, but the process of rehabilitation was swift. Shostakovich wrote works in an officially-approved optimistic vein, and earned a living by writing film scores. In 1949 he was sent as a Soviet delegate to the first World Peace Congress in New York.

This gave him the dubious honour of toeing the official line in an international context, which he dutifully did. The reward was a state gift of a dacha outside Moscow, and, in 1950, his ideologically sound oratorio The Song of the Forests won him the Stalin Prize and 100,000 roubles.

The Fourth Quartet, completed in 1949, was one of a number of works which had to be kept out of circulation until after the death of Stalin. A public airing of a work with such a blatantly Jewish-flavoured finale would have attracted the wrong sort of attention - the song cycle, From Jewish Folk Poetry, one of the composer's most sheerly beautiful works, expressed even more vividly his compassion for a race of whom he said, "all of man's defencelessness was concentrated in them".

This gap between composition and performance was exceptional for a Shostakovich quartet. Of the 15, only No. 5, completed in November 1952 (and premiered postStalin in November 1953), had to wait more than a few months for a public performance. By contrast, Shostakovich's extraordinarily uncompromising pupil, Galina Ustvolskaya, had to wait nearly 20 years to hear many of the works she wrote in the 1940s and 1950s.

Listening to the quartets in roughly chronological sequence, it is salutary to think of what was going on contemporaneously in the rest of the musical world: Messiaen sowing the seeds of total serialism in the late 1940s, the burgeoning developments of the post-Webern world, John Cage's music of chance with its negation of personality.

Indeed, by the time of Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet in 1960, the avant-garde experimentalists in Poland were flourishing, Xenakis was a major presence, Ligeti was about to become one, and Stockhausen had written his Gruppen for three orchestras.

The Eighth has for a long time - and justifiably - been Shostakovich's most popular quartet. Written in Dresden, it's a piece into which the composer, who once said, "I worry about the lightning speed with which I compose", successfully poured his all in just three days.

It's not just a matter of the musical monogram (DSCH, derived from the composer's name with German-style note names), the myriad of other quotations, the dedication "in memory of the victims of fascism and war", or the fact that the composer tearfully told a friend it was his last work.

Much, indeed overmuch, is often made of the personal tragedy of Shostakovich and its expression in his music. Francis Humphrys's programme notes for the Bantry concerts almost invite one to see the works as the autobiographical diary of a uniquely oppressed individual. But the composer was fond of irony, and there's a resulting obliqueness in his music, not unlike the obliqueness of a public orator, who understands the limitations of being too specific.

It's no accident, surely, that Shostakovich at his most personal managed to be more concise than usual (the short Seventh Quartet in memory of his first wife was a good preparation), and that in the Ninth, he immediately seemed to be flexing some entirely new compositional muscles.

The Borodin Quartet was, as ever, an impeccable guide to this fascinating body of work, managing that rare feat of seeming at once utterly neutral and totally personal.

The Borodin String Quartet continues its series of Shostakovich quartets at Bantry House tonight with numbers 10,11 and 12, and tomorrow with numbers 13, 14 and 15. For information phone 028-52788