For instance, of the Fifth Quartet: "The whole feel of the piece is at once vast in its scope and tiny in its focus. The visual equivalent might be a Poussin landscape with its distant sunlit mountains in the background and, in the shadowy space up front, the smallest human gesture closely examined. But there can be no visual equivalent, nor any literary or theatrical equivalent, because the Fifth Quartet is utterly abstract and irreducible in the way only music can be [...]"
It may not be ideal — yet in its way, it works. It's a hard balance to strike and Lesser manages it with admirable self-awareness. The cumulative effect of the book is to send us back to the music with renewed enthusiasm and enhanced insight; and the impression of Shostakovich and his world as conveyed in its pages lingers in the mind long after the cover is closed.
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