This is the second Shostakovich set in this series. The first (5099923768628) mainly featured orchestral and concerto works, but also included the Eighth String Quartet, the best-known of the 15 that he completed. Here the emphasis is entirely on Shostakovich's chamber music, a medium in which he was an absolute master. It was to chamber music that he increasingly turned in order to express his inner-most anxieties about artistic life in Stalin's Soviet Union.

It is his chamber music that gives a true picture of this tortured 20th-century master. The larger works were mainly for public consumption, although even here Shostakovish fell foul of the authorities on more than one occasion. But in chamber music he felt free to write some of his most profound and heart-searching music.