RYEDALE came to York on Wednesday morning, when the Carduccis gave the third in their four-part series entitled Truth’s Disguise. It recreates the struggles of Shostakovich and the poet Anna Akhmatova to maintain artistic probity in the repressive cultural climate of Soviet Russia.

Alex Jennings declaimed four poems in translation, two by Akhmatova and one by her protégé Joseph Brodsky, after opening with Pushkin’s Foreboding. They were excellent scene-setters for two quartets right at the centre of the composer’s musical personality, No 8 in C minor (1960) and No 10 in A flat major (1964).

The Carduccis opened with No 10, much the more placid of the two works and brilliantly integrated around several small motifs. The group underlined the music’s unity by spotlighting individual voices. Like goldsmiths they made seemingly insignificant nuggets coalesce into an utterly persuasive whole, working them together around a creamy-smooth slow movement.

Shostakovich’s self-confessed ‘Requiem for myself’, his Eighth Quartet, is built around his musical monogram, DSCH. It was devastatingly autobiographical, not merely in its angry passion and volatility but in the players’ sheer precision throughout some of the most difficult passages in the entire repertory. The composer’s agonies are right on his sleeve here and the Carduccis exposed them clinically. It was nothing short of breathtaking.