The preludes and fugues are coming thick and fast now, writes David Ward. Number 13's fugue is relaxed, an amble towards a hopeful ending; number 8's prelude is perky, but its fugue is long and solemn, with a bleak leap in its subject.
But treat this talk with care. In a crack-of-dawn lecture (9.15 on a Saturday morning - are we all mad?), David Fanning, who appears to know everything about Shostakovich, warns against grafting meaning onto the man's music without listening to the notes. The big question he asks is: who is the eighth quartet for? (If anyone knows, he ought to: he's just written a book on the subject.)
With its alleged evocations of droning aircraft and gunfire - it was written in three days in 1960 after a visit to bomb-battered Dresden - is it really a tribute to the victims of fascism and war, as inscriptions on some printed scores would have us believe? Or was it a suicide note from a man thinking of consummating his own finale?
My brain hurts. A realisation dawns that so much of my listening is superficial. But I'm cheered up by seeing so many students involved in this epic weekend: 23 string quartets and eight piano trios, not to mention virtuosic Ozan Evruk, whose bassoon in a piece by Gubaydulina has to do things this gently retiring instrument never normally does.
In a mid-morning concert, the more mature Adria Quartet, an amateur group named after a street in Didsbury and including my Manchester Evening News colleague Rachel Pugh, excel themselves in Schnittke's Canon In Memoriam Igor Stravinksy: it's compressed and intense, and has almost as many silences as notes.
Should have said: this weekend at the Royal Northern College of Music is about Shostakovich and his contemporaries, so strange names such as Herman Galynin keep turning up. His piano trio, played by two different student groups, was worth hearing for its chilly passacaglia with haunting harmonics. Here we go again: chilly? haunting? What have these words to do with sound?
And what would Dmitri himself make of all this? Outside the college is a smokers' shed, a see-through bus shelter thing with two battered chairs and an ash tray. I can see shy Shostakovich in there, avoiding the limelight, having a quick drag and peering at Manchester through his jam-jar bottom glasses.
