CONCERT 12 DECEMBER 2025
DANEL QUARTET – GALILEE QUARTET
The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich’s death, a milestone celebrated across the world with performances, festivals, and renewed reflection on his artistic legacy. Few ensembles have contributed more profoundly to our understanding of Shostakovich’s chamber music than the Danel Quartet, whose complete cycles—performed throughout the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, France and beyond – are considered benchmarks of interpretation. We are honoured that Marc Danel, the quartet’s first violinist, serves as the Honorary President of the Xenia Chamber Music Course, where he returned in 2023 and 2024 to offer masterclasses of exceptional inspiration.
Sharing the programme for the upcoming concert on 12 December in Paris is the Galilee Quartet, whom we were privileged to host at the Xenia Course in 2024. Originating from the Galilee region and shaped by a cultural landscape deeply marked by the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the quartet brings to its playing a distinctive artistic voice, enriched by both heritage and resilience, and increasingly recognised on the European chamber music scene.
The programme notes that follow were written by Elizabeth Wilson, co-founder of the Xenia Chamber Music Course and a leading scholar of Shostakovich. Her contribution provides invaluable insight into the emotional depth, structural mastery, and historical resonance of Shostakovich’s work.
Concert – 12 December 2025, 19:00
Temple du Foyer de l’Ame
7B rue Pasteur Wagner
75011 Paris
https://chostakovitch.org/
Programme
Mahboub Qalbak, traditional Druze song
Shostakovich – Quartet No. 8
Shostakovich – Quartet No. 13 (fragment): French Première
Galilee Quartet
Mostafa Saad — 1st violin & oud
Gandhi Saad — 2nd violin & voice
Omar Saad — viola & percussion
Tibah Saad — cello
Intermission
Shostakovich – Quartet No. 10
Shostakovich – Quartet No. 12
Shostakovich – Quartet No. 2
Danel Quartet
Marc Danel — 1st violin
Gilles Millet — 2nd violin
Vlad Bogdanas — viola
Yovan Markovitch — cello
Programme note
by Elizabeth Wilson
Tonight’s concert features two remarkable string quartets: the well-established Danel quartet, perhaps the premier interpreters today of Shostakovich’s string quartets, and the young Galilee quartet, made up of four siblings of Palestinian-Druze origins, living today in Paris. They derive their name from their birthplace in Maghar, in the Galilee region. Today, as a string quartet they perform widely throughout Europe, and are perfecting their studies at the CNSMDP. In addition they are participating in masterclasses with members of the Danel quartet, whom they consider to be one of the biggest influences and inspirations to them in the world of string quartet.
The Galilee Quartet is equally at home playing traditional Druze music on traditional instruments as they are playing Western classical quartet repertoire. They open the concert with a traditional piece, usually sung by the Druze community, called Mahboub Qalbak, which originates from Al Suwayda in southern Syria close to the Jordan border.
The Galilee Quartet’s particular love of Shostakovich’s music reflects their empathy with his ability to give expression to the widest gamut of human emotions. To them, not least is the spirit of defiance, essential to maintaining independence of thought and actions for those living under repression. In this they can identify with Shostakovich’s life and his ever positive attitude to creativity.
Their programme follows with the French première of a quartet fragment dating from the late summer of 1969, shortly after Shostakovich completed his Fourteenth Symphony. The fragment, marked Allegretto and lasting under 5 minutes, exists in clean manuscript, and as such appears to be the opening of what was to become his Thirteenth Quartet. The music seems uncharacteristic of late Shostakovich, featuring, as it does a kind of boogie-woogie dance. Over a 5 bar unit of pizzicato ostinato bass, the violins produce a dancing rhythm, while the viola’s role is subversive, rudely interrupting the fun in a loud descending figure.
Shostakovich laid aside work on the quartet until the summer of 1970. By this time he had taken on a commission to write the music for Georgy Kozintsev’s film, King Lear, and much of the new music for the quartet is directly related to the film score. He had radically changed his ideas about the opening of the quartet, which he fashioned in one uninterrupted arched movement, with the viola is the principle protagonist. (The quartet was dedicated to Vadim Borisovsky, viola-player of the Beethoven quartet which premièred all Shostakovich’s quartets from the Second to the Fourteenth.) In the finished version of the Thirteenth, the earlier Allegretto fragment appears as one of the sections just over 1/3 of the way into the quartet. Its carefree character, however is now overlaid by an eerie col legno effect, a percussive tapping of the wood of the bow against the body of the violin (or viola or cello). The two versions considerably diverge after the first two minutes. Interestingly enough towards the end of the 1969 fragment, a motif in the cello’s bass foresees the song Immortality from the Michelangelo Suite of 1974.
In 1959 soon after completing the 7th quartet and first cello concerto, Shostakovich underwent a crisis in his personal and public lives. His divorce from his second wife Margarita Kainova may have brought him relief, but being recruited into the Communist Party was his worst nightmare. Nikita Khruschev wished to “purify” the Party’s image now that he had exposed the truth about Stalin’s criminally repressive regime, and it was essential to have the support of the intelligentsia. Shostakovich, who had hitherto avoided joining the Party, finally succumbed to pressure.
In early July Shostakovich left for Germany in suicidal mood, upbraiding himself for applying to join the despised Party. The ostensible reason for the visit was to write music for Leo Arnshtam’s film about the allied bombing of Dresden.
Shostakovich was given accommodation in a composers’ rest house in the nearby town of Gohrisch. Here is what he wrote to his friend Isaak Glikman immediately on return from Germany: “the good working conditions (at Gohrisch) justified themselves: I composed my 8th quartet. As hard as I tried to rough out the film score, I didn’t get anywhere with it. Instead I wrote the ideologically depraved quartet which is of no use to anybody.” Why, one must ask , such blatant self-irony?
This is explained in another letter to Glikman: “I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write it myself. The title page should carry the dedication ‘To the memory of the composer of the quartet.’” Shostakovich thereby clarifies that the quartet is a review of his whole creative life through the device of self-quotation- and makes this abundantly obvious by placing at the work’s centre his musical monogram, the 4 note motif DSCH – the initials of his name in German notation. As work’s central theme, the DSCH motif necessitated resolution in the key of C minor, a tragic key for ¯Shostakovich as it was for Mozart and Beethoven. He confessed to Glikman that he himself was moved both by his music and by the perfection of form in its 5 linked movements.
The first movement, a meditative Largo opens with the cello intoning the DSCH motif- Shostakovich goes on to quote from various of his works, including his First Symphony written when he was only 19. It is followed by a violent Allegro Molto where the DSCH motif reaches frenzied proportions, At the culmination, a “Jewish” theme from his second piano bursts through, signalling protest. The third movement Allegretto is a sardonic Scherzo, where the DSCH theme features as a waltz, and we hear quotations of other works, notably the first cello concerto. The 4th movement Largo, a poignant Elegy, refers to Wagner and two works particularly dear to the composer, the revolutionary song, “Tormented by Grievous Bondage” and the Aria, “Serezha, my dearest one” from the final Act of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The work ends as it began, with the DSCH motif, now treated contrapuntally, where abstraction overcomes tragedy. Shostakovich officially dedicated the Eighth quartet to “Victims of War and Fascism” – it was appropriate, for Shostakovich also considered himself a victim.
In the second half of the concert, performed by the Danel quartet we hear three of Shostakovich’s quartets from different periods. The four movement Tenth quartet, dedicated to Moisei Weinberg , was completed on 20th July 1964 at the Composers’ Retreat in Dilizhan , Armenia. It as a companion piece to his Ninth Quartet, completed only weeks earlier. Built on the concept of contrast, its introspective and restrained first movement, Andante is followed by an Allegretto furioso of unusual violence. Here the first violin’s material represents the force of evil, while the cello’s second theme is no less aggressive. Throughout the work we see a conflictual dialogue between the two violins pitted against cello and viola. Whether in the grotesque upward glissandi in the violins or the long held fortissimo dissonances in the bottom strings, the brutal character of the music is unrelenting. The contemplative third movement Adagio, an elegiacal passacaglia, sees the cello leading the ostinato theme with passionate expressivity. The first violin enters into a contemplative dialogue with the cello, which throughout controls the passacaglia’s variations. The movement fades away in a transition to the extended Allegretto finale. Here a jaunty dance theme on viola starts the movement in pianissimo, and is significantly developed together with a descending theme of Russian intonation. As so often with Shostakovich, he builds a coda on material reintroduced from the other movements to great effect. Culmination is reached when the passacaglia theme bursts in fff on the cello over the initial dance theme played in prancing synchrony in the other instruments .As the music recedes into pianissimo, Shostakovich recovers his good humour and unifies the whole cycle by combining themes from the outer movements.
Shostakovich occasionally admitted to having favourite works. Amongst his quartets he singled out the Third of 1946 and the two movement Twelfth quartet dating from the summer of 1968 . He dedicated the work to Dmitri Tsyganov, the Beethoven quartet’s first violin, whose virtuosity and musical stamina is reflected in the music. It was as if Shostakovich wished to show himself as radical as the younger generation of Soviet Avant-garde composers such as Andrei Volkonsky and Andrei Schnitke, for he deliberately set out to use elements of the twelve-tone system. However, unlike them, he never embraced Schoenberg’s serial system or a-tonality as such. Another of the work’s special features is its symphonic scale, which stretches to the maximum the resources of the string quartet.
The opening Moderato starts with a harmonically ambiguous twelve–tone row intoned by the cello in the first bar. It lands unequivocally on the D flat of the tonic key in the following bar, and tonality is established. The expressive first subject played on the violin’s lowest register gives way to a waltz in “New Viennese” style- again using a 12 tone row within a tonal context. The monumental 2nd movement Allegretto is a quartet within a quartet. It opens with aggressive dissonances, trills, accents and brutal pizzicato chords pitted against the cello’s combative opening motif of four fortissimo 16th notes, part of a thrusting theme that dominates the whole movement- This first intensely complex section is followed by an Adagio section, where the cello introduces an expressive theme (another 12 tone row!) which in turn transforms into a muted chorale of haunting beauty. A moderato section follows where the first violin’s loud pizzicato spells out another tone-row, which soon transforms into the eighth note accompanying figure of the First movement’s initial theme. With great mastery Shostakovich extends the structure reintroducing material from both movements, and finishing with an energetic coda where all the thematic elements from the opening of the second movement come together in a triumphant and exuberant ending.
The programme concludes with Shostakovich’s Second Quartet dating from September 1944. For the composer, it sees an enormous step forward from his First Quartet of May 1938, written as a relative novice of chamber music. If he confessed that he wrote that work “as an exercise,” then here in the second quartet Shostakovich has become a confident master of the medium. It is conceived as a large symphonic canvas in four movements, tightly argued and with no superfluous gestures. Unlike his other War-time compositions, the quartet completely lacks any grotesque imagery, and is stylistically embedded in the past, drawing not only from the classical sonata cycle but with conscious reference to baroque forms. The first movement Overture uses thematic material of predominantly Russian character in a consistently forte dynamic, its energy derived from features like short thrusting crescendos under the first violin’s principle theme, and the dotted rhythm of the second subject.
In the second movement Recitative and Romance the music is of confessional nature and looks back towards late Beethoven. Shostakovich’s masterly ability to articulate recitative on string instruments strongly suggests that they derive from sung texts. The protagonist in both the recitative and the romance is the first violin, while the religious character of the short chorale responses and “Amen”-like cadences in the other instruments is self-evident.
The third movement (Allegro, is a shadowy Waltz in the far off key of E flat minor with the instruments muted throughout. The effect created is of suffocated expression, even as the music rises to a ff dynamic. Restless and driven forward precipitously, the waltz never totally dispels the mood of anxious foreboding.
The finale opens with a protracted introduction, before the viola introduces the main variation theme. Based on a modal Russian song, the theme is passed to each instrument in turn, before the variations are subject to almost symphonic development, reaching maximum intensity over the cello’s throbbing triplet quavers. As the music recedes to the tranquil mood of the opening, a typical Shostakovich coda starts, with a recollection of material from all the movements as a device to unify the cycle. With the last rhetorical sounding of the variation theme, the composer brings the work to a glorious conclusion.
