New insights into Shostakovich

As the 20th century recedes, its musical heroes seem to grow larger, standing increasingly free of the politics that clouded their reception and in some cases nearly destroyed their lives. Dmitri Shostakovich's music will never be disentangled from the tragic times in which he lived, nor should it be, but we may finally be ready to move past the vitriolic war of words about the composer's relationship to the Communist Party -- a dispute that flared through much of the 1980s and '90s and was too often framed in naive black-and-white myths and counter-myths.

What will be left after the Shostakovich Wars have faded is the story of a composer, brilliant and flawed, at once emblematic and extraordinary; and a body of work that seems more and more essential to the repertory of today. Certainly the ongoing Shostakovich centenary celebrations have brought renewed attention to the twin pillars of his work: the 15 symphonies and the 15 string quartets. Both have received new and fresh recordings, but the quartets have made their mark with particular force. The last few months alone have seen new discs by the Juilliard Quartet and the St. Lawrence Quartet among others. And live performances of this cycle abound. One is currently being performed by student ensembles at New England Conservatory, and the Borromeo Quartet kicks off its own survey beginning in February at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

For newcomers to this music, the string quartets are the best place to begin. They are usually glossed as private, deeply personal works that give voice to the otherwise guarded emotions of an artist caught in the relentless gears of a totalitarian state. The stark urgency of the writing makes it difficult to think otherwise, especially in works such as the wrenching Eighth Quartet, written in 1960 at a time of great personal torment, when the composer was grappling with the question of whether to join the Communist Party.

But the Eighth probably receives too much air time at the expense of the other quartets, which also make fascinating listening, and it is hard to go wrong with the new crop of discs. Of the lot, the St. Lawrence Quartet's release (featuring Nos. 3, 7 , and 8) is the most passionate and ultimately electrifying. The group plays these pieces as harrowing, naturalistic studies of human emotion; you can hear the pure fear and yearning, but also the mischievous humor, the biting irony, and what Primo Levi once called, in a different context, "this last, senseless crazy residue of unavoidable hope."

By contrast the Juilliard Quartet's approach in its two-disc set (including Nos. 3, 14, 15 , and the Piano Quintet with Yefim Bronfman) is less wild, slightly more distant but also impressive. They treat these works with all the intellectual rigor and integrity they have brought to the music of other 20th - century masters like Bartok and Elliott Carter. It is an approach that prompts less of an imagined identification with a composer's inner world than an appreciation for a body of chamber music that inhabits an increasingly central place, somewhere near the dark heart of the 20th century.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.