"Risky(er) Business" celebrates Dmitri Shostakovich and Nikolai Roslavets, Soviet composers whose experiments and ideologies lived on the perilous line between favor and dissent in the 1920s-’40s: when music represented power, politics, and the perspective of the people. When putting pen to paper wasn’t just risky. It was dangerous, even subversive. Which of them toed the line safely, and which landed on the wrong side of scrutiny – and survival? The Axiom Quartet will piece together that history through music at this concert.

The Second String Quartet of Shostakovich is “Music for the Drawer,” a now-celebrated masterpiece written with feverish frustration in 1944, giving voice to the Russian people through a transformed folk song. Stashed unpublished – wisely – for years, its descriptive twists, turns, grotesqueness, and richness spin a heroic and pointed unspoken manifesto. The Fifth String Quartet (1941) of Ukrainian Nikolai Roslavets has never been performed in the United States since its discovery in 2005, nor has it been recorded. Roslavets, a chief academic in the community of 1920s Russian modernists, came under scrutiny in the 1930s. Too late to save face with a government setting an example against intellectuals, he shipped his scores and publications to students and disciples across the globe for preservation, plotting a grail quest for historians to recover his work that continues to this day.