Donald Macleod views Shostakovich through the prism of his string quartets. Today, music for two pianos; music in praise of Stalin; and a quartet so subversive it had to be banned.

Shostakovich's father died young, so at 16, to help make ends meet, the aspiring composer had to take a job as a cinema pianist. As it turned out, this thankless drudgery stood him in good stead for his later work writing music for film; he was prolific, producing almost 40 scores in as many years. His music for The Fall of Berlin, a lavishly-funded Mosfilm epic, is by turns evocative and highly dramatic. If only the film - a self-styled 'artistic documentary' that rewrites the history of the Second World War with Stalin as the central character - lived up to the quality of the music! The same year he made that musical contribution to Stalin's burgeoning cult of personality, he also composed one of his most intensely beautiful string quartets, the 4th - Haydnesque in its clarity of expression and suffused with the spirit of Jewish folk music. Shostakovich's musical timing was faultless but his political timing was not so good. At that time the régime was engaged in a crackdown on the Jews - or "unpatriotic, rootless cosmopolitans", as Pravda called them - and the head of the Music Division of the Committee for Artistic Affairs determined that the new quartet should be consigned for the time being to the composer's bottom drawer, where it remained till after the Glorious Leader's death. Around the time of the 4th Quartet's eventual première, Shostakovich wrote his Concertino for two pianos, for his 16-year-old son Maxim and a classmate to play. It's a simple but brilliantly effective little piece whose mock-serious opening soon gives way to unbounded levity. Show less