Shostakovich: String Quartets Nos 1-4; Prokofiev: String Quartet No 2, Pacifica Quartet, review Cedille CDR 90000 130, 2 CDs, £12.99 A few weeks ago at London's Wigmore Hall the Pacifica Quartet concluded its outstanding survey of Shostakovich's 15 string quartets, exceptional both in the musicians" maturity and breadth of expression and in the sheer humanity and emotional force of the playing. Luckily, the Chicago-based Cedille label has recognised the Pacifica's strengths, and also its range, having previously released CDs of the complete Mendelssohn quartets as well as music by Dvoˇrák and a disc of Janácˇek, Hindemith and Ruth Crawford Seeger. The Pacifica's championship of the Elliott Carter quartets, both in live performances and on the Naxos label (8.559362-3), was also one of the musical high spots of recent times. All these recordings are well worth seeking out, as assuredly is this new disc, the second volume in a series entitled The Soviet Experience. The first volume (CDR 90000 127), released last year, covered Shostakovich's Quartets Nos 5-8 with Myaskovsky's Quartet No 13. This one groups the first four quartets together with Prokofiev's No 2, composed in 1941 in between Shostakovich's First and Second. The playing is nothing short of phenomenal, bringing new dimensions of interpretative depth and a subtle fusion of intensity and clarity to a corpus of music that might now be familiar but which continues to yield up its secrets only guardedly. Everything about these performances points to an ensemble with an acute understanding of the music's implications and with a capacity to communicate it freshly by means of a broad, astutely applied spectrum of timbre and a compelling blend of immediacy and intimacy. The first two discs are already benchmarks in this repertoire. When the series is complete, it looks set to be the one to own.