As much as the now popular sentence naming Shostakovich the Beethoven of the 20th Century is debatable, nobody can deny an amount of contact points between the two composers: above all, the favorite musical mediums and the engagement in historical and political coeval affairs. However, we think that nothing like their Late String Quartets can offer material for a comparative listening and analysis. In both cases we can easily detect what Edward Said defined and discussed as the Late Style. And in both cases we are in front of a complex and vibrant dialectic between a process of abstraction and a moral imperative to stick to the hic et nunc. Such an intellectual and existential confrontation is fruitfully without solution and offers a never-ending space to insights and interpretations. Here we propose Alma Quartet's outlook first instalment.