Burning brightly amid Shostakovich's darkness

The Emerson String Quartet's all-Shostakovich concert on Friday was a potent reminder that great art serves not only to comfort but also to unsettle.

On the bill were the last three string quartets Shostakovich wrote (numbers 13-15). These late works speak in a private code of lamentation. With the exception of Mahler, no composer has looked so unflinchingly at death and tried to convey its essence in music. Hearing them seems more akin to eavesdropping on a confession than listening to a concert.

What's surprising is that, for all their despair, the quartets are also strangely beautiful creations. The viola dominates the 13th, which moves in a single arc from eerie dissonance to agitation and back again. The 14th, its complement, is the most outgoing of the three, featuring some of the manic energy of Shostakovich's earlier works. After an intricate, impassioned slow movement, it seems to find some small peace at the end, as if the composer were reflecting on the whole sweep of his life.

None of which prepares one for the 15th and final quartet, which is a world unto itself. It is a series of five slow movements played without pause. Like Samuel Beckett, Shostakovich strips his language to its absolute essentials. Textures grow ever thinner, leaving a sense of icy barrenness at the end.

So it was an altogether strange experience when the audience then erupted in cheers. Applauding and shouting bravos -- these are intensely affirmative actions, and it was jarring to hear them in the face of music so intent on negating any glimpse of happiness. Maybe silence is the most appropriate response to such unearthly art.

If the outburst of praise made sense, it was because of the Emerson quartet. It's hard to imagine a group inhabiting this rarefied world more completely and with greater understanding than these four players did. The works' emotional challenges are matched by their musical difficulties, and the players were every bit their equals. That passionate identification was the greatest light in an evening of unremitting darkness, the best argument against the gloom Shostakovich so eloquently marshaled.