Rudolf Barshai's amplifications of Shostakovich's Eighth and Tenth String Quartets had the composer's approval. Their objective, in Barshai's words, was ''to bring the best of chamber music to mass audiences in large concert halls''; and besides, as DJF writes in a note accompanying these recordings, the quartets have a public dimension that is emphasized by these arrangements.
Of course, of course, but yet: Shostakovich conceived them, however public their dimensions, for string quartet (and who is to say that four instruments cannot make a public statement, to a large audience if necessary?), which is to say for four solo voices, with all that that implies in terms of individual expression. Some of the gestures are very big ones, but it is sometimes they, paradoxically, that are most diminished by amplification: not only can a string orchestra not move at the velocity demanded by the Eighth Quartet's scherzo, but the shocking force of the fourth movement's hammered staccatos is reduced: we expect a massed string force to be capable of such weight. And in lyrical music, of course, we miss the expression of personal grief or tenderness or loss that a solo performer can communicate. No doubt to compensate for this, Barshai (he was a quartet-player himself, of course) incorporates a number of solo passages in both arrangements: for the poignant quotation from The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in the Eighth Quartet, for example—how could that emotion be distilled by massed violas?—and its crushing by the subsequent tutti is indeed undeniably effective.
Apart from such moments of dramatic contrast, what is emphasized is mass and darkness (double-basses reinforcing the cello line) and an at times noble gravity. All the positive factors are enhanced by Barshai's own performances, using a fair-size but not over-large string group (about 30). Bigg (on Trax Classique/EMI) has a group of comparable size or a little larger, by the sound of it: fine readings, but not quite so virtuoso as Barshai's, and the furioso scherzo of the Tenth Quartet is cautiously negotiated (even Barshai, a good deal faster, misses the hysterical quality that a good quartet can draw from this music). The Montreal performances on Chandos are by an orchestra about half the size of Barshai's or Bigg's, and they are so formidably drilled that they can sometimes make up in sheer grainy attack what they lack in solo expressiveness. But they sometimes over-compensate, too, with heart-on-sleeve phrasing and rather melodramatic colour effects.
In short, if you want the Chamber Symphony and the Symphony for strings, Barshai is an authoritative and safe recommendation, and he is admirably recorded. But the expressive burden of the Eighth and Tenth Quartets can only partially be conveyed by these arrangements, skilful though they are.'