Classical review: Borodin Quartet

NZ Herald·

17 Sep, 2018 05:00 PM2 mins to read

Vladimir Balshin (left), Sergei Lomovsky, Igor Naidin and Ruben Aharonian gave a highly charged performance.

At its Auckland concert, the Borodin Quartet reaffirmed both the pleasure and privilege of experiencing the sublime artistry of one of the world's leading chamber music ensembles, with a 73-year lineage to prove it.

Apart from a dizzying whirl through Hugo Wolf's Italian Serenade, totally in keeping with leader Ruben Aharonian's later description of it as "extremely satirical", the programme reflected the musicians' Russian homeland.

Admittedly, the first quartet of Haydn's Opus 33 "Russian" set is Slavic in title only and was dispensed with a very Viennese elegance and clarity.

An individual touch was world-weary rubato in its purposeful Allegro; the high point, an Andante that enabled Aharonian's violin to soar over his colleagues' sonorous accompaniment.

Shostakovich's Ninth Quartet proved to be something of a culture shock after 1781 vintage Haydn.

This 1964 score came across as a cry from the very soul of a wounded Russia.

Early on, a few shafts of harmonic sunlight may not have prepared us for the searing emotional crunch of two slow movements, in which one felt the weight and intensity of every single note.

Tchaikovsky's First Quartet portrays a Russia that was not only pre-Stalin but pre-Revolution and the Borodins held nothing back in their highly-charged performance.

They effortlessly conveyed a sense of romantic striving, in both the dramatic to-and-fro of musical argument, and moments in which one sensed rich textures were calling out for fuller orchestral shading.

Yet could there have been anything simpler and more elegiac than this quartet's lovely Andante cantabile, its familiar song done full justice by Aharonian's lyrical violin. There was more simplicity in the encore that followed, a short Evening Prayer by the same composer that, in the precision and sensitivity of its delivery, revealed the truth of that old adage of art concealing art.