Quatuor Danel | Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, & Weinberg Cycles

The Quatuor Danel regularly performs the three great 20th-century Russian string quartet cycles: the quartets and sextet of Tchaikovsky, the fifteen quartets by Shostakovich, and the seventeen by Shostakovich’s friend Mieczysław Weinberg (1919–1996). The Danel was the first ensemble to play the complete Weinberg cycle live, in Manchester and Utrecht; with their performance of the cycle at The Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.) in May 2019 they also became the first to do so in North America.

It was thanks to Shostakovich that Weinberg was able to settle in Moscow in 1943 (having fled his native Poland) and the two became lifelong friends. Shostakovich described Weinberg as “one of the outstanding composers of today.” Weinberg claimed that the older composer introduced him to a “new musical universe.” As a Jewish composer living under Stalin, Weinberg endured numerous personal attacks in the official press and an arrest in 1953. It was again thanks to Shostakovich’s intersection that Weinberg was released from prison two months later. Weinberg never compromised as a composer, remaining true to himself, whether in his remarkable series of symphonies, in his opera The Passenger, or in this extraordinary cycle of string quartets.