There are few more extraordinary works in the string-quartet repertory than Shostakovich's 15th, and no music that sounds more like a valediction. Everything is reduced to bare essentials; there are never two notes when one will do the job. For all the introspection, though, the 15th Quartet comes with more than its quota of mysteries. It's a summation and a reflection of a troubled musical life that seems to cry out for explanation, for its codes to be deciphered, its world to be documented.
But there isn't the sense of logic about The Noise of Time that one really wants, no feeling that this dissection of Shostakovich's life has to end with a performance of the final quartet, any more than with the 15th Symphony (another work shot through with enigmatic references) or even with his last major work of all, the Viola Sonata. It would be harsh to describe a performance as masterly as the Emersons' as arbitrary - the command of the playing, its purity and eloquence are totally compelling - but it does not grow naturally out of the dramatic context already established with any sense of inevitability or certainty.
The snapshots of Shostakovich's career that Complicite provide seem haphazard too. It was a life in which the public and private were constantly in dissonance, in which what Shostakovich thought - as far as we can tell from the posthumous evidence - and what he said in his music were often deliberately at odds. To dwell upon the 10th Symphony, as The Noise of Time does, yet make no reference to the two moments of public humiliation in the composer's life - the official criticism of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936, which led to the withdrawal of his Fourth Symphony, and the condemnation of his music at the Congress of Soviet Composers Union in 1948 - is at least curious, and those who know little about these critical episodes in his life might be puzzled by the play's reference to Shostakovich's complaint that his symphonies were banned.
But then The Noise of Time never makes up its mind about its priorities. Is it a discourse on what happens when we listen to music, using the 15th Quartet as the case study, or is it an exploration of Shostakovich's creativity? It's never made clear, never brought into focus one way or the other, until the Emerson take over with their remarkable performance.
Until July 15. Box office: 020 7638 8891.
