Active engagement with the arts helps us live longer, research suggested this week. Listening to live music strengthens the sinews just as much as a weekly workout apparently. So this performance [on 8th May 2026] by the Carducci Quartet proved a delightful way to swerve the dumbells and stave off the final whistle just by sitting in St Alkmund’s awash in spring sunshine.
This was the second time the Carducci have played here, Shrewsbury’s premier music venue, and the third time they have featured in Shropshire Music Trust’s programme. As per previous visits, they brought impeccable Shostakovich, adventurous contemporary repertoire and collaboration with a star turn, this time international pianist Simon Callaghan, to join in the fun this foursome clearly on the concert platform.
They presented Shostakovich’s third string quartet, written in the aftermath of ‘The Great Patriotic War’, with a committed and crystalline acuity. They teased out its quizzicality towards war – the heroic, the elegiac, all kinds of trauma made bearable by irony and allusions to the eternities contained within Beethoven’s late quartets – with intelligence and alert musicianship. When the ticking waltz of its second movement returned, after we had revisited the ghosts of other earlier material, it brought with it a moment of such beauty and force that the dial on the lifespan of the audience must have cranked collectively upwards. Caroline Shaw’s ‘Entr’acte’ followed as both relief and a continuation of reveries on timelessness: a dreamy re-imagining of the exploded harmonies of Haydn’s 2nd quartet, Op.77, where the Carducci ushered us expertly into unexplored corners of tonality. A real gem wonderfully discovered.
The second half was given over to Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A minor. Some piano quintets seem written to offer the chap on keys the chance for flashy showboating. Not here. As four became five, they delivered a performance that cherished the integrity of this work as a chamber piece, Callaghan’s virtuosic technique sublimated into deft ensemble and the rich, verdant harmony of late Elgar until the final torrents of its finale when he bowed out in a blaze of glory. "Some day,” wrote Elgar in a letter, “the press will awake to the fact that the living centre of music in Great Britain… is not London but somewhere further North". As the SMT season draws to an end, Shropshire is answering that call – and closes on June 5 with a choral celebration of its greatest musical sons, Dr Charles Burney, by Ex Cathedra at St Chad’s.
James Fraser-Andrews
