Written between 1970 and 1974 as illness tightened its grip, Shostakovich’s last three string quartets form a late-cycle summit—music haunted by mortality yet sharpened into startling clarity. The Thirteenth unfolds as a single, searing span: a viola-led lament whose dark kinship with King Lear gives way to eerie chorales, brittle staccato figures, and unsettling percussive taps, culminating in a “screaming crescendo” that feels like a cry into emptiness. In the Fourteenth, dedicated to a cellist, the centre of gravity shifts: an almost radiant F-sharp major frames a work where personal signals, affectionate quotations, and an inward Adagio duet open brief windows of warmth and tenderness. The Fifteenth is the ultimate valediction—six consecutive adagios in E-flat minor, titled like a private ritual (Elegy to Epilogue), its spare textures and suspended time seeming to float in a no-man’s land between life and death, where grief, memory, and inevitability are spoken in the quietest tones.