String Quartet No. 10 in A flat major, Op. 118
String Quartet No. 12 in D flat major, Op. 133
String Quartet No. 14 in F sharp major, Op. 142

„ …the Mandelring Quartet makes it abundantly clear that it is building one of the outstanding cycles in today’s catalogue.” (The Strad about Vol. II) After the most successful release of Vol. I, II and III the Mandelring Quartett continues its complete recording of Shostakovich’s fi fteen string quartets with Vol. IV. The more Dmitri Shostakovich became involved with his country between 1960 and 1970, the more stagnant became his creative output. One of the reasons for this was surely the composer’s waning health. Also, his role as a political exhibit in the state of Khrushchev and Brezhnev was not always a source of inspiration to him. Shostakovich had to endure physical decline, as well as the schizophrenic setting of conforming when he was a non-conformist at heart, which wore him down mentally and paralysed his creative work. In this situation of suffering chamber music increasingly took on the quality of an intimate diary in which Shostakovich struck personal notes without foregoing innovations or experiments. This begins in String Quartet No. 10 (1964) where the goose-step of the rulers can be heard, as well as the will of the individual to survive. His most innovative work, and perhaps his most important quartet, is the String Quartet No. 12 (1968) where the composer makes systematic but not dogmatic use of dodecaphonic methods for the fi rst time. String Quartet No. 14 (1973), on the other hand, was written during his fi nal period when Shostakovich increasingly composed slow movements and intoned lamentos. With Shostakovich’s fi fteen string quartets the Mandelring Quartett presents a quartet cycle, which in its entirety probably represents the most important corpus of string quartets of the twentieth century.