An Incendiary Outcry Shostakovich and contemporaries - heard by HOWARD SMITH '... little to quibble at ...'

The four sequential Shostakovitch quartets 1952-1960 recorded here are from the post war period when Stalin died and Nikita Krushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party (Soviet Union) for the following eleven years -- 1953 through 1964.

The Fifth Quartet was written in the northern autumn (1952), a few months before atherosclerosis-sufferer Josef Stalin's death in March 1953. In the event Shostakovitch withheld the work till its launch in November 1953.

Genocidal Soviet affairs under Stalin's rule were renounced by his successors, most notably Khrushchev (February 1956)...

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

CEDILLE RECORDS

STRING QUARTET

RUSSIA

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA