It's a Music of Extremes

The Collective’s Adam Szabo delves into the music and themes of our latest show, and asks – is what we create inextricably tied to our circumstances?

Cries and Whispers is a string quartet programme; a musical journey into the heart of darkness. In different ways, I guess you could say that all of the repertoire in this show explores the darker side of what it means to be human.

Manchester Collective are performing three quartet pieces – by Widmann, Britten and Shostakovich – all of which have something very different to say about this common theme. These quartets are then haunted by the spirit of a fourth set of music, a selection of Carlo Gesualdo’s madrigals: brief choral pieces dating back to the 16th century. 

The most recent work in the programme is a quartet written in 2003 by German composer Jörg Widmann. His music often explores microscopic sounds and textures that are quite different to a lot of the rest of the programme. This particular piece we’ll be playing, the Choralequartett, is inspired by the seven last words of Christ on the cross. You can hear rubbing and scraping sounds which evoke skin and flesh on wood. It’s a really economical piece – very short, but with a huge amount packed in. It ends up taking you to quite a disturbing place.

Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.8 was written nearly half a decade earlier. Shostakovich lived under the Soviet regime in the USSR towards the middle of the 20th century. He was an artist who, consistently throughout his life, really struggled with the idea of artistic self-expression whilst working under this very controlling regime. A lot of his music carries layers of meaning – on the surface it can seem very triumphant, but if you dig deeper, it’s often actually suffused with irony and sadness. There are these big, bombastic musical victories but somehow, when he writes them, they feel hollow and empty. In his music there’s a lot of spare beauty, a lot of bitterness and sarcasm too.

Listen to the Cries and Whispers playlist

Shostakovich’s eighth string quartet is one of the most unambiguously autobiographical pieces that he ever wrote. Going back hundreds of years, composers have often enjoyed playing games with musical notation and hiding secret messages in musical scores. Shostakovich uses this technique where he takes the first initial of his first name – D for Dmitri – and then the first three letters of his surname – S/C/H – which when written in musical notation become a really specific and recognisable tune. This musical motif is what this entire quartet is based on. The piece is totally about him and his life, down to the literal notes in the score.

Throughout Cries and Whispers, a question seems to re-emerge: to what extent is the music that people produce a result of who they are? For Shostakovich, it’s very clear that his life and his music are totally intertwined. Benjamin Britten, especially in his operatic output, seems to be obsessed with ideas of innocence, persecution and corruption; he also happened to be a gay man living in mid-century Britain, so I guess some of those connections are there to be drawn.

With Gesualdo, it’s not as clear if there is a link. We’re talking about a man who is notorious for brutally murdering his wife and her lover. I’m really not sure if you can hear that in his music! What is clear, however, is that he was hundreds of years ahead of his time writing the music that he did. His music is full of these incredibly gnarly harmonies – so complex and ingenious that a lot of music written hundreds of years later sounds tame by comparison.

There’s huge emotional range in this programme, but running through the show, there’s also something very particular that happens to the quartet players themselves. The structure of the group is all about the connection between the four musicians. Like family members, lovers or friends, they are sharing something very private. I think that with a good quartet, you can always feel this connection in performance – the players are no longer soloists, and you’re dealing with a unique setup where each person is an indispensable part of the whole.

The challenge for the Collective, as always, is to bring the audience along on this emotional journey with us. It’s a great programme for people who want a taster of what we do, because every extreme is explored.