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“Arresting performance from superb quartet”~ Stephen Fisher ~ read full review
“Russian joke to start the year off right”~ William Dart ~ read full review
“The hall was absolutely chocka”~ Murray Khouri talking to Eva Radich ~ read full review
“Musical masters set benchmark for quartet string playing”~ John Button ~ read full review
“Shostakovich well served by Russian quartet”~ Rosalind Appleby ~ read full review
“Finding tears behind the straight face”~ Peter McCallum ~ read full review
“Great technique and musicianship”~ Jennifer Gall ~ read full review
“Nuance, intimacy and good vibratos”~ Eamonn Kelly ~ read full review
“Hearing the Borodins live in concert connects us to the source of Russia’s musical legacy with all its attendant complexities and triumphs.”~ Euan Murdoch ~ read full review
“I know of no other quartet in which the players efface themselves as selflessly as in the Borodin”read full review
18 February 2010
Borodin Quartet: Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne, February 16
The Borodin Quartet opened its present tour for Musica Viva with an all-Russian program that emphatically demonstrated the ensemble's disciplined, nuanced and intimate approach to sound production and musical narrative.
The first half paired Shostakovich's fourth and 13th string quartets, idiomatically cognate but written two decades apart and drawing on quite different musical threads, from Jewish folk music and jazz riffs to passages of pure serialism and splashes of Orthodox hymns.
Shostakovich's quartets are laced with references that superficially suggest musical paraphrase and explicit statement but intrinsically reveal irony, ambiguity and repressed emotion.
The temptation for performers is to strip away this uncertainty and bring amorphous shapes from the musical background into sharp relief.
The Borodin Quartet made no such concession. Dynamics, articulation and other markings were all realised but there was no overstatement, no emphasis added for dramatic effect, and certainly no attempt to simplify, on instrumental lines, the many complex passages where elements of melody, harmony, rhythm, expression and timbre are inextricably interwoven.
Instead, there was a steady focus on sound quality and luxurious tone, thanks to outstanding bow control: even contact, perfect weighting, precise placement, and effective bow-speed changes. This technique gives the sound depth and conviction, allowing vibrato to serve its true purpose as an expressive tool.
The often amiable fourth quartet's suppressed anguish and rage was palpable, giving the sensation of being trapped in an emotional pressure cooker.
The unguarded angst of the 13th, with its sparse sonic shards and pervasive sense of dread, was conveyed with honest but never ugly economy.
Phrasing and ensemble were near faultless while control over dynamics, timbre and balance was by far the best I've heard in this brutally exposed acoustic.
The late quartet's viola solos were beautifully executed, in an ensemble that does not have a weak link.
After interval, the performance of Borodin's popular second quartet was well-considered and beautifully wrought. The crisp, sometimes sharply articulated treatment given to the first movement was a little surprising, and the wild romanticism with which the third movement is typically offered was nowhere in sight.
There were no great sweeps of beauty and some may have found this reading perfunctory.
However, there was no doubting the lively musical intellect at work, the attention to detail, and that magical depth of sound quality that so few ensembles currently possess.
