If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. Better yet, ask Patrick Moore, a founding member of the Axiom Quartet, who’s on a mission to raise the cultural perception of the city. “I want people to feel as excited about coming to a string quartet concert in Houston as they would going to hear the Vienna Philharmonic in Vienna,” the cellist says.

With that in mind, Axiom has thrown down the gauntlet and is dedicating its 2025–2026 season to performing, in order, the complete cycle of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets for their first-ever live presentation in Houston. “They’re all spectacular pieces,” says Moore. “It just seemed like the right time to try and do all of them.” Only a handful of ensembles have taken on the full cycle, including the Jerusalem Quartet, which performed the works in Cleveland this past April, and the London-based Brodsky Quartet.

None of the members of Axiom—in addition to cellist Moore, there are violinists Matt Lammers and Tim Peters and violist Katie Carrington—can recall exactly who among them proposed the idea of performing the Shostakovich cycle in its entirety. They do remember it was discussed over lunch at Fadi’s in Meyerland, and someone pointed out that 2025 would be the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death. “It sounded, at the time, pretty far-fetched,” says Peters, who is also a first violinist with the Houston Symphony. Like the other members of the quartet, he keeps a busy schedule as a chamber and orchestral musician and educator. “But then we kept on asking ourselves, ‘Why not do this?’” Moving forward with such a plan would mean presenting a longer season than usual and learning a ton of challenging music in a relatively short time.

Composed between 1939 and 1974, the quartets are filled with harrowing dissonances as well as moments of transcendent stillness and beauty. When taken together, they are widely acknowledged by musicologists as containing some of the most inventive and sublime writing for string quartets in the twentieth century. They are also deeply autobiographical. Born in 1906 and coming of age after the Russian Revolution, Shostakovich gained worldwide fame for his symphonies and operas. His works were subjected to censorship by Soviet authorities and often overtly propagandistic. “Shostakovich lived with the reality of an oppressive political body that was insistent upon controlling what he released as an artist,” says Moore. “He felt enormous pressure to produce big pieces that could appeal to the Soviets’ tastes.”

In contrast, Shostakovich employed the smaller scale of a string quartet to explore the extremes of emotion he experienced in the Stalinist Soviet Union, as well as the post-traumatic stress of having survived the regime when many of his fellow artists and intellectuals had not. (During the political purge in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Shostakovich’s brother-in-law, mother-in-law, sister, and uncle were all imprisoned.) Shostakovich’s music found new life in Russia’s concert halls after Stalin died in 1953, although he continued to endure intimidation and pressure from the Communist Party.

The parallels between life under Stalin and the impacts of our country’s current political climate on the arts, science, and education are not lost on the quartet (earlier this year, an executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] programs in federally funded institutions led to the sweeping cancellation of NEA grants and the intimidation and firing of staff at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Smithsonian museums). The title of Axiom’s season, Unbroken, acknowledges this history and the resilience of Shostakovich and the other quartet composers Axiom will perform to complement the cycle, such as Alan Hovhaness, George Rochberg, Elizabeth Maconchy, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Ben Johnston.

Beginning around 1760, and on up to the present day, the string quartet—two violins, a viola, and a cello, instruments which mirror the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass (SATB) voices found in choral music—has provided composers with a balanced sonic palette for their most personal and forward-thinking work. “It’s music for small spaces,” says Carrington. “Listeners get to focus on the individuals in the ensemble.” One such venue is the intimate Houston Sängerhalle, which takes up 200 seats inside the historic Heights Christian Church, where Axiom will perform the Shostakovich cycle. It’s a space they find ideal for connecting to music and their audience.

“We’re on the audience’s level, surrounded by them, and facing each other while playing,” says Lammers of the Sängerhalle. “We’re the ones playing the notes. But physically and spiritually, everybody in the room is part of what’s going on in the ensemble.” And after countless hours of rehearsal before a concert, it is the audience that completes the piece. “I love looking out at people while I’m playing,” Peters says. “There are special moments when I can see how the music is impacting an audience member, and that then feeds back to me and becomes this loop.”

Onstage, the dapper musicians take turns introducing pieces they’re about to play to the audience in congenial and unpretentious language. Nevertheless, they share a radical attitude toward the moribund nature of classical music performance. “I think chamber music is the punk rock of classical music,” says Lammers, who at 32 is the youngest member of the quartet. “If there’s ever going to be an environment to turn the standard concert experience on its head and say, ‘We’re shaking out the dust! This is going to be a completely different experience than what you’d expect,’ it’s chamber music.”

Axiom has been “shaking out the dust” for audiences since its founding in 2014, bringing music to surprising spaces, including coffeehouses and pizza parlors, George Bush Intercontinental Airport, and underground—literally—at Cave Without a Name in the Texas Hill Country. The quartet’s tours of the state bring them into contact with small towns isolated from the opportunity to hear world-class classical music performances. And audiences often surprise them. Peters recalls a gig at the resort town of South Padre Island, where a laid-back audience (“very Jimmy Buffett!”) welcomed Axiom to the community. At the end of the concert, a woman in her eighties introduced herself to Peters as the former principal piccolo player with the Houston Symphony. In town to visit a relative, she lived about a 12-hour drive away from South Padre. “You never know who your audience is going to be,” he says.

While Axiom traveled beyond Texas in its earlier incarnations, including a 2018 tour of rural China, the quartet is happy to serve Houston as its home base. But doing so still entails a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes. “There’s a lot of sweat equity in this business,” says Moore. “It’s just about impossible to pay ourselves for the actual number of hours we spend practicing our instruments and practicing together.” Thanks to a supportive board, a committed base of individual donors, and the occasional grant, the quartet stays afloat, though time to rehearse remains at a premium. Carrington quotes the late, great Leonard Bernstein, “‘To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time!’”

As the first concert of the seven-concert season approaches on Sunday, October 5, with Quartet Nos. 1 and 2 on the program, how does Axiom know when a piece is ready to perform?

“It’s never ready. Never,” says Moore emphatically. “Because, if you’re a really good musician and you know how to listen, there’s always something to fine-tune.”

Each concert is a snapshot in time, providing the opportunity to explore and take real-time chances in front of an audience. “You don’t want a concert to feel totally comfortable,” says Lammers. “It should be this elastic improvisation, where we’re kind of peeking our heads around corners we’ve never turned before, and being so well connected, if someone takes that corner, it’s a four-person organism that takes that risk.”

Taking risks while playing music at the highest level: it’s how Axiom brings that Vienna vibe to H-Town.