Shostakovich quartets to glimmer in West Cork candlelight

A special celebration of the music of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich will take place in West Cork this month.

Presented by West Cork Music, the complete cycle of Shostakovich’s 15 quartets will be performed by the Carducci String Quartet in a candlelit Bantry House on the October Bank Holiday weekend, 24-26 October. The performances will form part of West Cork Music’s first autumn festival.

There will be five concerts in total amounting to just over six hours of music. The weekend opens on 24 October with Shostakovich’s gentle and reflective Quartet No. 1 in C major.

It closes on 26 with a finale which concludes with his Quartet No. 15 in E flat minor.

For over a decade the Carducci String Quartet have been performing the works of Shostakovich which were composed over 35 years from the Stalinist Purges in the '30s, to the Nazi invasion and the siege of Leningrad, the post-war crushing of artistic independence, and the death of Stalin in 1953.

The story goes that Shostakovich loved chandeliers fitted with real candles, like the one in the Bantry House library. He enjoyed preparing them, making sure each candle stood at a true vertical, setting a match to the wicks in advance and then blowing them out so they would be easier to relight when the big moment came.

So, perhaps he would approve this candlelit celebration of his fifteen great string quartets as part of West Cork Music’s first autumn festival.