By turns furious and fierce, gentle and reflective, Shostakovich’s Tenth String Quartet charts a vast terrain of emotions while leaving its audience free to determine the work’s message.

The Borodin Quartet offers it in tandem with the Eighth Quartet, an unequivocal indictment of inhumanity as experienced by those who lived through Stalin’s Terror and suffered under Nazi oppression, and crowns its programme with the ultimately consoling invention of Beethoven’s Quartet in C sharp minor.