Got Beethoven – My First 40 Years with the Brodsky Quartet

Paul Cassidy

Troubador 328pp (pb) £12.99

This year sees the Brodsky Quartet celebrate 50 years of passionate, innovative music-making at the top of the profession. To coincide, its violist of 40 years Paul Cassidy follows his childhood memoir Get Beethoven with a helter-skelter, fiercely convivial account of life with the quartet across the decades.

Got Beethoven describes the ‘extreme highs and devastating lows’ of life on the road, galloping through tours, residencies and recordings via a succession of anecdotes full of drama and teeming with larger-than-life characters alive and dead. Of the latter, Shostakovich figures most poignantly as the Brodskys champion his quartets through changing times, perceptions and personnel.

But it’s the former to whom Cassidy shows most devotion alongside his daughters and wife Jackie, also his cellist colleague. With exuberant hat-tips – and not infrequent scowls – towards a slew of composers and fellow musicians, promoters, hosts, chauffeurs and more, he’s at his most eloquent when popping balloons of cultural snobbery. Star of the show in that regard is Elvis Costello, with whom collaboration opened important doors for the Brodsky to the worlds of pop and rock. Steph Power ★★★