IMSLP Forums

I've recently discovered that the Bretano String Quartet has been performing a program which they call "Fragments: Connecting Past and Present", the links below cover the project which involved writing modern pieces to join with unfinished works by famous composers.

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-res ... -fragments

http://classical-scene.com/2011/10/18/b ... nnections/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/arts/ ... .html?_r=0

One of the selected pieces was an Allegretto movement for string quartet by Shostakovich which was allegedly written between the 8th & 9th String Quartets. I knew that Shostakovich had written two different versions of the 9th Quartet, but I believed he had destroyed the first version.

I'd love to know more about this work, particularly it's rediscovery can anyone help?

You may already have happened upon this, courtesy of the Hal Leonard site:

"Being published for the first time, this composition was discovered in 2003 in Shostakovich's Archives by Olga Digonskaya and Olga Dombrovskaya. This work has been defined as one of Shostakovich's early attempts to write the Ninth Quartet, but for some reason, was never completed. The work was written between the end of August, 1961 and the third or fourth weeks of June, 1962.

The composition consists of two author's manuscripts. The first is an incomplete fair score of the first movement (a total of 225 bars) on 12 sheets (one empty) of 12-line piano score paper, paginated by the author on every page, 1 through 22, and with bar-by-bar indexing in indelible pencil. The author's manuscript is written in purple ink. In the upper margin of the first sheet, the composer wrote, “Quartet No. 9/I,” and in the upper right-hand corner, “'DShostakovich/op.113' Key Es-dur, tempo Allegretto.” The second author's manuscript includes a complete rough draft of the first movement on four similar sheets with incomplete pagination by the author, 1 through 6, written in the same ink, and a sketch of 16 bars on the back of the last sheet.

The Unfinished Quartet was first performed on 17 January, 2005 in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory by the Borodin Quartet."

I could find no further elucidation of the music's discovery anywhere I looked, just variants of the above. The Russian publisher of the works of Shostakovich, DSCH, has a site with no English translation available for the pertinent link. Given the - ahem - quality of that site, the link may contain only the Russian version of the above quote.

Hal Leonard is the U. S. distributor for both score and parts, and the publication(s) supposedly include a more detailed explanation of the music's discovery by the two Olgas.

Thanks for that. Do you know if there have been any scholarly publications covering this?

In addition to my work in opera, I also make a living as a professional Russian-English translator. If you need a hand to untangle a Russian-language website, you can drop me a line