Shostakovich: Two Pieces For String Quartet, Score

Category: String Quartet, Two violins, viola and cello ** Title: Two Pieces for String Quartet ** Score ** Composer: Shostakovich, Dmitri ** Publisher: Edition Sikorski ** Difficulty: A5.

Two Pieces for String Quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich is a work without an Opus number. It is sometimes denoted as Op. 36 or 36a, but that number is already assigned to an orchestral suite. It seems that the two pieces for quartet were never published during the composers lifetime, but instead discovered in the 1980s; they appear to have been written around 1931. They are short pieces, made up of themes that would go on to be central to other works by Shostakovich: in the first piece, Elegy, we hear a plaintive aria from his 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District; the second is a tongue-in-cheek Polka from his 1930 ballet/orchestral suite The Age of Gold. Best suited to an advanced string quartet.