I’ve been immersing myself in the Shostakovich quartets again lately. Some of the profoundest and most extraordinary music I know. I have four sets — the Borodin, Brodsky, Emerson, and Fitzwilliam — and keep meaning to write something up about their respective strengths.

Honestly, I love them all. But there are a handful which I love even a little more than the rest, and tonight it has to be the fifteenth that I cue up, written in his final year. Wendy Lesser, in her really excellent book Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, says that she has personally witnessed audiences walking out during this piece. (The first movement, roughly 12 minutes long, is meant to be played so deliberately, according to the composer himself, “that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom.”) !  In reality it is so sublime. My favorite recording here, of those I’ve heard, is the Fitzwilliam, but it is unavailable on YouTube, so here’s a live recording from the Emersons: