Summer Concert #1: Shostakovich/Mozart/Dutilleux

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: String Quartet in D Minor, K. 421
Dmitri Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 6
Henri Dutilleux: String Quartet “Ainsi la Nuit” (Thus the Night)

Since Newburyport can’t ever seem to get enough of Shostakovich, we return this season with his sixth quartet. If  you are expecting the usual bleak fare you’ll be in for a disappointment; this is a playful work, even happy, with gentle humor and a lack of irony that shows an optimism we don’t usually associate with the depressed Russian master (…or does it?).

Mozart’s string quartet in D Minor, K. 421 is unrelentingly dramatic from the first moment to the last. Written two years before the opera Don Giovanni (about an unrepentant lothario dragged screaming into the pits of hell), this dark work is one of Mozart’s only quartets written in a minor key.

Written in 1976, Henri Dutilleux’s “Ainsi la nuit” (Thus the Night) is a beautiful, profound work and a meditation, of sorts, on the meaning of night.