Quartet No 2 - Shostakovich
Quartet No 1 - Shostakovich
Quartet No 3 - Shostakovich
Shostakovich came relatively late to the string quartet. But, once he'd started work in the medium, his output of quartets exceeded his output of symphonies.
The First Quartet was written in 1938, when the 32-year-old composer had been through, in fairly rapid succession, some of the extremes that life threw at him - the official condemnation of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the withdrawal of his Fourth Symphony, the invitation to teach composition at the Leningrad Conservatoire, and the resounding success of the Fifth Symphony.
The quartet is a modest, unassuming sort of work, its transparent classicism prompting contemporary Soviet commentary on its naivety, but also on its "reflection of a new and beautiful ideal" and a "lyrical elation expressive of the new phase in his development and that of Soviet music as a whole".
The First Quartet is a mere quarter of an hour long. The Second and Third are each more than double that length. They share with their predecessor a simplicity, even banality of musical material, and are not shy of setting out on discourses which rely heavily on repetition.
Unlike the style of the greatest masters of the string quartet in the first half of the 20th century, Bartok and the members of the Second Viennese School, Webern, Schoenberg and Berg, Shostakovich writes in a style that is less concerned with making every note count than in creating the scaffolding for altogether more generalised gestures.
It's not an easy style to bring off in performance, and it's through a consistent grasp of the whole and an unwaveringly faithful focus on the individual moment that the nature of the Borodin String Quartet's unique communication of Shostakovich lies.
True, the Borodins have qualities which make them special in any kind of repertoire. They play with a sparseness of vibrato that highlights the consistent trueness of their intonation. They don't insist on expressive underlining as a matter of course. So when they do want special attention, like soft-spoken individuals persuasively raising their voices, they get it.
Perhaps the easiest way to summarise the compelling appeal they bring to this music would be to say that they show that deceptive and deep simplicity that you typically find when composers play their own work. Everything is so deeply understood, so completely internalised, that the normal means performers use to sell to an audience seem ridiculously redundant by comparison.
