The Brodsky's Shostakovich anniversary cycle for St George's culminated in this challenging evening of quartet-playing, where the sense of a composer addressing the fundamentals of life and death were never more profoundly invoked.

The two movements known as Adagio and Polka - originating respectively in Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and in the ballet The Golden Age - might have been a perfect ending, with the polka's satirical wit sending the audience out dancing. But the Brodsky programmed them first, knowing full well that there could be no following the soul-searching farewell that is Shostakovich's last essay in the medium, the Quartet No 15 in E flat minor.

Framed by the Adagio and Polka and Beethoven's F minor Quartet Op 95, Elena Firsova's 12th Quartet, given its UK premiere here, ought to have taken its place easily enough. The work bears the title Farewell, but its anguished atmosphere, wrought primarily by the three upper instruments, led nowhere. It was all the more perplexing for constantly creating the expectation of a cello intervention to transcend the angst and transform the emotional balance. That didn't happen, and the Brodsky's evident sympathy couldn't make good on the deficit. The Beethoven compensated, though, with a tautness and energy that underlined Shostakovich's debt to the classical model.

Written just a year before his death in 1975, it is not simply the valedictory nature of the 15th Quartet that is so moving, but the seemingly fearless way in which Shostakovich confronts his fate. Revisiting many of the forms that preoccupied him as a composer, he pays brief homage but then shifts his gaze to another plane of human experience, tacitly accepting that the answer will not lie here any more than somewhere else. The Brodskys' achingly beautiful performance reached deep into the heart of the man, and the long silence that preceded the tumultuous applause acknowledged as much.