It was a privilege to be at the final concert of Chamber Music New Zealand's season for the year, and enjoy the Borodin Quartet, one of the world's best; a nice closure, too, for a CMNZ year that has focused on the string quartet.
Nostalgia must have been a prime motive for the Borodins' inclusion of the last of Nikolay Myaskovsky's string quartets. It is difficult to enthuse over this faded 1950 score, by a composer who left the world 27 symphonies, picking up five Stalin Prizes in the process.
Nevertheless, such was the persuasiveness of the performance, one almost overlooked the diluted sub-Rachmaninov lyricism, and those heartless contrapuntal conversations that continually passed around the musicians.
Shostakovich's Eleventh Quartet is made of sterner stuff. Here, one was instantly captured by the clear, clean elegance of Ruben Aharonian's violin, drawing his colleagues into the bleak beauty of Shostakovich's world. There was the glint of steel in the Scherzo and, once the terseness of the Recitative had been mollified, the following Allegro evoked images of political and personal precariousness as the first violin gleamed and skimmed over dark and sometimes aggressive mutterings.
