NDR Chamber Music Concert / Noah Quartett

String quartets were always a form, with which composers could entrust their most personal being. Brahms lived by the motto »Frei aber einsam« (free but lonely), symbolically encapsulated in the tones FAE. In the first movement of his String Quartet No. 2 in a minor, he deviates from his defiant motto to the tone sequence AFAE and builds another movement upon it. About Shostakovich’s third quartet, a colleague wrote: »It is in all of his music. Following the best traditions in Russian art, here the dark and ugly side of life – terror, repression and suffering – are reflected in mysterious romanticisation of the eternal light.«