The heart-wrenching key of D minor featured prominently in works throughout Mozart’s short life – his Requiem, the Overture to Don Giovanni and the great Piano Concerto No. 20, to name a few. The brooding drama of this key also plays a central role in his Quartet, K. 421, the second of six quartets that Mozart devoted to his great mentor, Haydn. The operatic melodrama and heightened pathos of this music pervade the quartet with tragic undertones, yet there is the sense that this is Mozart bearing his soul through the intimate conversation of four voices.

Shostakovich also turned to the string quartet to express some of his most intimate and deeply held thoughts. The Ninth Quartet is no exception, being dedicated to his third wife in 1964, a period of relative calm after years of tumultuous personal and political turmoil for the composer. The five interconnected movements of this work continue the intense, highly personal style of the preceding quartets, while also foreshadowing the more bleak and sparsely textured quartets that were still to come. Yet this work stands apart from those around it in offering a glimpse of optimism and even a hint of rare, unabashed exuberance.