The personal and the political are inextricably linked in a work that Shostakovich dedicated to his friend the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, who died unexpectedly in February 1944. “I owe him my entire development. You can’t imagine how difficult it will be for me to live without him,” Shostakovich lamented. Outside events were equally bleak, as Russians struggled valiantly against a long German occupation.

However dramatic the events that inspired the work, it begins subtly, with a solo cello playing high harmonics. The effect of the unusual timbre persists as the violin enters in its low register; by the time the piano joins the canon, each instrument seems alienated within its own space.

The second movement is a kind of “black scherzo,” whose compulsive rhythms, cascading patterns, and pizzicato are always threatening to veer out of control.

The Largo begins with a piano chorale that establishes a passacaglia pattern; as it repeats, its hint of dissonance leads into a denser and more uncomfortable texture, though never abandoning a dark beauty. Its elegiac character, expressing the composer’s sorrow for his personal loss, leads directly into the agitated dance of the last movement. A Jewish tune, ever more frenzied, is likely a response to the horror of the concentration camps. The return of material from previous movements brings us full circle, tying together the personal, the political, and the unknowable.

—Susan Key