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This week, Donald Macleod views Shostakovich through the prism of his string quartets. Today, the composer withdraws from the risky world of public art to the inward sphere of the quartet.

Shostakovich came relatively late to the string quartet; he wrote his first in the year following the 5th Symphony, which had marked his rehabilitation after the furore whipped up by Stalin over the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District - "Muddle instead of music", screamed Pravda - and the suppression of his angular, epically-proportioned 4th Symphony. A bad review from the Soviet state's official mouthpiece wasn't just an inconvenience; if you were considered guilty of 'formalism', or of not reflecting 'the life of the people', you could be whisked away in the dead of night and never seen again - or not for a long time, anyway. So after what must have been a truly terrifying period for Shostakovich, it's not particularly surprising, even once the 5th Symphony had been pronounced an official success, that he should have decided to take a holiday from the limelight and immerse himself in the rarified world of the string quartet - beyond the interest and under the radar of Soviet officialdom. Shostakovich's 1st String Quartet is a charming if relatively unambitious work, described by the composer as "joyful, merry, lyrical" and even "springlike", though a vein of melancholy winds its way through the first three movements. The story goes that Shostakovich's Piano Quintet started life as a second string quartet - with the composer adding a piano part when he realized that touring with it would allow him to travel!