Lucy Russell violin

Colin Scobie violin

Alan George viola

Heather Tuach cello

Shostakovich          Quartet no.13

                            Elegy and Polka (1931)

                            Quartet no.9

                            and movements from Quartets nos. 4, 6, 7

On 16 November 1972 the composer Dmitri Shostakovich sat in the Lyons concert hall, listening to his own music – the Western première of Quartet no.13.  It is unlikely that anyone fortunate enough to have been there will have forgotten that historic occasion. Forty years on, the Fitzwilliam Quartet returns with a concert featuring all of his music from that visit:  the thirteenth quartet plus the extracts of other quartets that they played to him in his hotel room the following morning. The programme is completed with two early pieces, discovered soon after his death and sent to the Fitzwilliam by the USSR state music agency, and finally the quartet dedicated to his wife Irina, who also came to York in 1972.

http://www.fitzwilliamquartet.org/