Hear the magnificent music three 20th-century masters created in the midst of war and oppression. Prokofiev wrote his quartet during his evacuation to a remote Soviet city at the onset of Germany’s invasion of Russia. Bartók fled Hungary when war clouds gathered, and his quartet is filled with foreboding. Shostakovich’s dramatic masterpiece from 1960 was dedicated to the victims of fascism and war, while also serving as a pained self-portrait, quoting earlier works.