PCMS presents the Borodin Quartet

The ensemble worked so closely with Dmitri Shostakovich that he dedicated several of his later quartets to its individual members, in each case highlighting the role of their instruments. These quartets are among the greatest since those of Beethoven, and so the intimate collaboration between composer and musicians — Shostakovich wrote with the specific timbre and personality of each in mind — is one of the most remarkable relationships in musical history, and it would warrant the Borodin a special place in cultural memory even if it had long since disbanded.

A deep tradition

The original members of the Quartet are long gone, of course, but their musicianship was passed on through the students they trained, and the current edition carries not only a name but also a deep tradition in its bones. All four are very fine, but the anchor of the group appears to be the bearded cellist, Vladimir Balshin.

European artists tend toward longer recitals than American ones do, and the Borodin offered full weight and more in their Perelman Theater recital for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Its “overture” was the Second String Quartet of its namesake, Alexander Borodin, whose famous Andante, recycled through Broadway, has one of those overly familiar Romantic melodies whose connection to pop lyrics is easily distracting. It was not so in the present case, however, because the quartet offered a sensitive and committed reading in which the melody was recaptured for the music. For Borodin himself, music was an avocation, since he was by profession a chemist. However, he was in no sense an amateur, and though his output was modest it is of exceptional skill and quality. Only an assured master could manage the transition from the Andante to the Vivace finale in a way that so perfectly clears the mood. The ensemble projected the music’s robust sound while losing none of its chamber intimacy and design.

Biographically problematic

Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet is probably the most frequently performed in the cycle of his 15. It is also in some ways his most biographically problematic. He wrote it at white heat in July 1960, supposedly inspired by a film project he was simultaneously involved with that featured a graphic sequence on the wartime destruction of Dresden. It was also at about this time that he made a long-deferred (and clearly reluctant) decision to join the Communist Party, which allegedly brought him to the brink of suicidal depression. According to these accounts, the Eighth Quartet was thus intended as a final statement, and its biographical associations are obvious. In addition to the musical monogram of D-E-flat-C-B (the equivalent, in German musical notation, of the opening letters, DSCH, of Shostakovich’s name), Shostakovich also quotes a range of his other compositions in the score from the First Symphony of 1925 to the First Cello Concerto of 1959.

We can certainly read the Eighth Quartet as an apologia pro vita sua at a traumatic moment in Shostakovich’s life, but we can also listen to it as a taut and superbly integrated single movement work in five distinct sections. These enact a drama of not only surpassing bleakness, but also of a gripping, tensile strength. Suicide doesn’t sound like this, at least to me: This music is a response to tragedy, not an anticipation of it. Again, the quartet projected a deep sense of its inwardness as well as of their own long association with it. There are other ways to play this music, for example with the Emerson Quartet’s more thrusting, aggressive sound. However, on its own terms, it could not be played better.

A work of heavenly length

Borodin and Shostakovich together were nearly an hour of music; the program’s second half, featuring Schubert’s Quintet in C Major (D. 956) was just as long. Robert Schumann famously described Schubert’s Ninth Symphony as a work of “heavenly length,” and the same may be said of the Quintet: It is music that never seems to end, but which at the same time we only wish to go on.

No loss in musical history, not even Mozart’s, can perhaps compare with Schubert’s death in 1828 at the age of 31. Beethoven followed hard on the heels of Mozart, obviously not eclipsing him but pointing the way to a new musical language. Schubert had no one of his caliber to succeed him, with all due respect to the great figures of early Romanticism, and we can only conjecture — not imagine — how Romanticism might have developed in the decades after him had he remained on the scene.

The loss was all the greater in that many of Schubert’s finest works, including the astonishing harvest of his final year to which the quintet belongs, were unperformed for decades, and his revival only began in the 1860s, when Brahms and Wagner were already carrying music in its late-19th century direction. As Bernard Jacobson points out, though, Schubert’s formal innovations already anticipated those of Bruckner and Mahler. Musical history judges him as a magnificent pendant to Beethoven, who predeceased him by only a year; he might have been one of its great revolutionaries instead.

The Borodin was joined for the quintet by David Finckel, the Emerson Quartet’s cellist, and they meshed well. The second cello part has a great deal of pizzicato, and the brilliant duet between Finckel’s plucking and that of the Borodin’s first violinist, Ruben Aharonian, was one of the highlights of the performance. Schubert ended all too soon, but his music is about forever.