Shostakovich and His Comrades is the title of this year's chamber music festival at the Royal Northern College of Music. A vast, hugely important project, its aim has not only been to present the composer's chamber music in its entirety, but to place it alongside works by his compatriots, colleagues and pupils. No less than 38 ensembles have been involved, all but one of them - the visiting St Petersburg Quartet - drawn from college members past and present or from local schools.

At the final concert on Sunday evening, the St Petersburg Quartet played the composer's final three quartets, Nos. 13-15. They make for difficult, uncompromising listening. The 13th is a sustained howl of desperation in which the four players must function as an indivisible unit if the work is to have its full impact. Its successor, No. 14, in contrast, returns to the quintessential Shostakovich theme of the relationship between the individual and the group as the leader literally leads the other three performers through a series of halting, awkward dances. No. 15, with its unbroken chain of six successive adagios and its echoes of Russian Orthodox church music finally achieves a tentative, exhausted peace. Each performance can only be described as a tour de force.

The lyrical, nostalgic Fifth Quartet features in one of the afternoon concerts, gracefully played by the Maraini Quartet, one of the RNCM's college ensembles. Its companion pieces were the B Minor Piano Trio by Shostakovich's pupil Boris Tchaikovsky and Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky's Lacrymosa. Yanov-Yanovsky, writing after the fall of communism, elaborates on Shostakovich's analysis of political guilt in a dark work for soprano (Janet Fischer) and strings (the Martindale Quartet). Tchaikovsky's mercurial trio, in which salon waltzes collide with passages of Bach-like austerity, was given a performance of suave brilliance by the Shezan Trio, a fine ensemble, of whom one needs to hear more.