Composers are heavily influenced by the times in which they live and this reflects in their music, according to Douglas Beilman of the New Zealand String Quartet.
The quartet's latest project is a series of concerts contrasting the works of the Romantic composer Robert Schumann (1810-56) and the Soviet composer Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-75).
They will be playing one in Dunedin on August 17.
Beilman says there seemed to be parallels, not between what they were expressing in their music, but in the ways they developed as composers and their artistic vision.
Schumann had a vivacious, quicksilver personality and his music had a great deal of intimacy.
Shostakovich's music also has a kind of intimate confessional about it, but for a different reason.
After a promising early career, the Soviet bureaucracy denounced his music as being decadent and polluted by bourgeois sentiments, Beilman says.
"So he was forced, as quite a young artist in his 20s, into not conforming necessarily, but finding a way to disguise and veil his music in ways that became quite multilayered.
"If you think it sounds simple in Shostakovich, it's not, because of what you hear before and after.
You can have what sounds like a waltz but it doesn't stop and there's something brutal about it.
It's telling you something.
He's not just making fun of things; he might be commenting on human nature."
In his quartets, Shostakovich was always exploring the idea of an individual voice in confrontation with seemingly impermeable and unchanging authoritarian elements, he says.
"The humanity of a single instrument playing in a soliloquy is definitely quite a recurrent thing in Shostakovich's music.
Not that all these melodies or solo voices are saying the same thing, but it seems that idea of isolation and separation and alienation is a very strong and sad current in his music."
Schumann, writing a century earlier, (this year is the 200th anniversary of his birth) tended to be more obsessive, writing lieder (songs) one year, chamber music another, and then moving on to symphonies or another musical form.
His quartets were written shortly after he'd finally married the love of his life, Clara Wieck, the daughter of his piano teacher, who refused to allow her to marry a penniless composer.
They had to wait until Clara, a talented musician herself, came of age in 1840.
The quartet, which is based in Wellington where its members teach, enjoys doing themed concert series like this, something many other quartets, which spend most of their time touring, cannot do, Beilman says.
Members of the New Zealand String Quartet have just returned from playing at northern hemisphere summer festivals and recording another CD, in Toronto, with music by Asian composers.
They have just released the third in a series of Mendelssohn string quartets.
Because quartets do not have conductors, members make decisions about their performance communally.
"All the decisions have to be consensual so everybody can believe in what they are doing at the time.
"One of the things to remember is, hey, there's more than one concert - we can try things differently, so you can always be allowing different possibilities," he says.
See them
The New Zealand String Quartet will be playing Shostakovich's Quartet No 5 and Quartet No 9 and Schumann's Quartet in A major Op 41 No 3 in the Glenroy Auditorium on August 17 at 7.30pm.
