Joining together Schnittke's piano quintet with
Shostakovich's last string quartet on a single disc was inspired. Both works were composed in the mid-'70s in the U.S.S.R., but more importantly, both works are intimately concerned with dying and death: Schnittke wrote his piano quintet on the death of his mother and
Shostakovich wrote his last string quartet the summer before he himself died. But while the works have many things in common -- a tonal language that moves freely from consonance to dissonance and an emotional intensity that can grow almost unbearable -- there is one fundamental difference between them: Schnittke's is a public work of mourning and consolation while
Shostakovich's is a private work that is not so much about dying as it itself enacts the processes of dying. In this 2002 recording of the quintet and the quartet, the
Keller Quartet is joined by pianist
Aleksei Lubimov in performances of immense strength and awful power. The
Keller is a superlative young quartet whose severe tone and austere colors are wonderfully appropriate for the music.
Lubimov is an affecting pianist whose playing brings tremendous depth and gravity to the quintet. Indeed,
Lubimov and the
Keller's performance of the quintet may be the most affecting ever recorded, moving from grief through mourning to comfort and consolation. While the
Keller Quartet is equally well performed, its interpretation may be too dramatic and demonstrative for some listeners, making too public a process that is fundamentally private. But even those listeners will still be deeply moved by their anguished performance. ECM's sound is completely transparent and thoroughly unobtrusive.