The title
Reflections
is about as generic as can be, and the murky booklet notes don't help much. Fortunately, the music here can speak for itself, and it is well played, crisp but lyrical when it needs to be. The reflections of the title are those of the composers themselves, their inner feelings, and the degree to which they are audible in the musical surface. The 20th century champion in terms of hidden meanings was
Dmitri Shostakovich
, whose romantic feelings toward his student
Galina Ustvolskaya
provide a kind of program for the
String Quartet No. 5 in B flat major, Op. 92
, but also mix with the composer's ambivalent perspectives on the death of
Joseph Stalin
and his own still fragile ideological rehabilitation. The
Shostakovich
is ingeniously paired with the
String Quartet No. 4
of
Grazyna Bacewicz
. This is an early work that draws on Polish folk music, as per socialist-realist dictates, but proves similarly hard to pin down. As an entr'acte, there are seven of
's
24 Preludes, Op. 34
, Bachian piano works here arranged for string quartet. This suffers from the same problem as do string quartet versions of
Bach
himself, namely that the textures of the string quartet are anachronistic to the music, but the two main works on the program are nicely illuminated by this somewhat underrated chamber ensemble. ~ James Manheim