Shostakovich in Lucca: transparency and intensity
OperaClick on the First and Third String Quartets in Quartetto Guadagnini’s complete Shostakovich cycle in Lucca.
“A lightness of touch matching the neoclassical transparency of the First Quartet, and a sorrowful intensity in the Third.”
The Lucca concert marked a further stage in Quartetto Guadagnini’s long-term journey through all fifteen of Shostakovich’s string quartets. The programme brought together the First Quartet, with its lucid neoclassical surface, and the Third, whose scale and emotional pressure open onto a very different landscape.
OperaClick drew attention to the contrast between these two worlds: lightness and transparency in the First Quartet, sorrowful intensity in the Third. The observation captures one of the central questions of the complete cycle — how a recognisable voice changes across works written over almost four decades.
Presented within the quartet’s residency at Lucca Classica, the concert belonged to a project designed not as a sequence of isolated performances, but as a sustained encounter with Shostakovich’s musical thought.