Emerson String Quartet Plays Shostakovich

The string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich are remarkable and often disturbing. I like this video of the great Emerson String Quartet playing one of my favorite passages––the third movement, allegro non troppo, of Quartet No. 3. It was composed in 1946, more than a half dozen years before Stalin's death, but I think it shares a lot in common with his post-Stalin works. (For example, compare it to the second movement of the Tenth Symphony.)