Pacifica Quartet: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

With this Tiny Desk Concert by the Grammy-winning Pacifica Quartet, we have the opportunity to explore the world of a single composer. With the arguable exception of Béla Bartók’s six string quartets, it’s generally accepted that the 15 by Dmitri Shostakovich are the strongest body of quartets since ’s no way around it — the Shostakovich quartets are intense, like page-turning thrillers, as they pull you into his world. They are dark and introspective, witty and sarcastic, and stained with the Soviet-era violence and hardship the composer lived through. He died in movements from different Shostakovich quartets display the brilliance of the composer, the sheer power of the string quartet medium and the nuanced playing of this group, which has recorded all of the composer’s No. 7 in F-sharp minor, Op. 108 (1960)Eerie pizzicato and piercing stabs in the violins help color the twitchy, even sinister, opening movement of the Seventh Quartet. Stalin might have been dead si