Risky(er) Business

Risky(er) Business celebrates Dmitri Shostakovich and Nikolai Roslavets, Soviet composers whose experiments and ideologies lived on the perilous line between favor and dissent in the 1920’s-’40s: when music represented power, politics, and the perspective of the people. When putting pen to paper wasn’t just risky. It was dangerous, even subversive. Which of them toed the line safely, and which landed on the wrong side of scrutiny – and survival? Join the Axiom Quartet as we piece together that history through music.  

The Second String Quartet of Shostakovich is “Music for the Drawer”, a now-celebrated masterpiece written with feverish frustration in 1944, giving voice to the Russian people through a transformed folk song. Stashed unpublished – wisely – for years, its descriptive twists, turns, grotesqueness, and richness spin a heroic and pointed unspoken manifesto. The Fifth String Quartet (1941) of Ukrainian Nikolai Roslavets has never been performed in the United…