Borodin Quartet true to composer's intent

 

by David Gordon Duke

Friends of Chamber Music
The Borodin String Quartet
Vancouver Playhouse
Nov. 15, 2005

The Borodin String Quartet celebrates its 60th anniversary this season. Founded in Moscow in 1945, the group has had a long, intimate connection with the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich. Decades ago, when the original Borodin members first recorded the cycle, few Western listeners were prepared to consider them anything more than Soviet-era novelties.

Today, on the threshold of the Shostakovich centennial, his quartets are considered a stable of the repertoire, played by any and all groups of stature.

The Borodins have never been exclusively associated with Russian repertoire; Beethoven is another specialty. Their performance of the third of Beethoven's Rasumovsky quartets was (judging from the opening movement) robust and warm-hearted, with lots of opportunities to display the finesse of first violinist Ruben Aharonian.

But it was earlier performances of the Eighth Shostakovich quartet, dating from 1960, and the Tenth, written just four years later, that made the evening. It's become increasingly common for ensembles to emphasize the expressionistic aspects of Shostakovich.

The Borodins’ approach to the Tenth highlighted its deeply classical bone structure. From the gray, undemonstrative opening Andante they used a subdued colour palette and a studied approach—no extremes of dynamics, no excessive detailing, just an honest rendering of the composer's intentions. Cellist Valentin Berlinsky, the only original member still with the group, had moments of extraordinary lyricism in the Adagio, but never allowed his sombre, mournful material to intrude. For all the work's expressiveness and lyricism, nothing was allowed to compromise the compelling overall logic which sees the composer's seemingly diverse materials fuse together in the work's concluding moments.

The Eighth is a more theatrical composition—an autobiography in music, or at least pages from a diary—but here again the Borodins’ focus was always on the work’s unfolding structure.

Many of the world’s great ensembles play more dramatically, or with greater superficial allure. With the Borodins one is ever aware of their uncannily unified ensemble, their precisely matched and completely balanced voices—the ultimate quartet ideal of four musicians playing as one.

Vancouver Sun
16 November 2005

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