Sivr 127

Here's an excellent Shostakovich chamber program, combining music from different phases of the composer's career as well as introducing two fairly unusual works in combination with a great masterwork, the Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67. This work, written in 1944 as the tide had begun to turn against Hitler's armies in Russia, is perhaps the definitive musical response to the horrors of the Second World War. Its final movement, evoking klezmer music gradually overtaken by darkness, is almost unbearably moving.

Fresh, vibrant, informed; these are adjectives that continue to apply to the Beethoven string quartet cycle performed by the Artemis Quartett on the Virgin Classics label. Having studied with some of the world's finest ensembles including the LaSalle, Alban Berg, Emerson, and Juilliard quartets Artemis exceeds the sum of its education by not simply mimicking its predecessors, but improving upon them.

Founded in 1992, the New York-based Brentano Quartet is known for its interpretations combining perfect technique and matchless musicality. Those qualities are even more obvious in this series of late Beethoven quartets with this first volume bringing together the Op. 127 and 131. This pure crystal of intelligence and brilliance will doubtless constitute a milestone.