Borodin Quartet plays Shostakovich and Beethoven

It's been 15 years since the Borodin Quartet performed in Philadelphia. The Borodin musicians are Russian royalty, and they enjoy the same reputation in their native country that the Budapest Quartet had in its heyday—as the group everyone else is measured against. From its inception in 1945 the Borodin enjoyed a close relationship with Dmitri Shostakovich, who performed for it and personally supervised its recordings of his quartets.

It's a different ensemble today, of course, but its reputation is no less authoritative.

The Borodin chose two middle-period Shostakovich quartets for last week's program at the Perelman Theater: the Third and the Fifth. As if the severity and weight of these two half-hour works were not enough, the group chose Beethoven's Grosse Fuge to conclude. Ear candy this was not, though caviar for those—not enough locally, to judge by the barely respectable house, including a papered balcony— who had the taste for substantial and partly unfamiliar fare.

Cold War prejudice

Shostakovich ultimately wrote 15 quartets to go with his 15 symphonies, and hoped to write a cycle of 24 in each genre, one for each major and minor key of the chromatic scale (though the prevailing signature in some pieces isn't always clear). For that, he would have needed 30 more years than he had.

The achievement is, nonetheless and needless to say, formidable. The Shostakovich quartets are now commonly perceived to be of more uniform quality than his symphonies, and it's often said that Shostakovich reserved his more "private" (and, inferentially, more authentic) thoughts for the intimate medium of the string quartet. This is a debatable proposition, and perhaps a residue of the general Cold War prejudice that tended to disparage all but a handful of Shostakovich's works as propagandistic and/or banal. The quartet cycle, once all but simply ignored at least on this side of the Atlantic, has now gained general acceptance as one of the major contributions to the literature, but the prejudice still lingers for the Shostakovich symphonies.

Mahler's pattern, too

It's true that his quartets are obviously easier to categorize as a group, since they're shorter and written for an identical instrumentation; there are no hour-long quartets, as there are with several Shostakovich symphonies. The quartets also all date from Shostakovich's middle and late periods, the former generally taken to have begun in 1937 with the move in his Fifth Symphony away from the eclectic modernism that had marked the initial phase of his career.

The first Shostakovich quartet did not date until a year later, and the Second Quartet didn't appear until his first eight symphonies had been produced. The Third Quartet (1946) was a product of his 40th year, and the Fifth (1952) of his 46th, by which times his mid-career style was well established.

The Shostakovich Third Quartet bears obvious structural affinities to the wartime Eighth Symphony. Both are five-movement works, with the inner movements consisting of back to back scherzos— the pattern of the Fifth and Ninth Mahler symphonies, too— followed by a slow movement in the form of a passacaglia that moves without pause into a rondo Finale.

Urgent lament

The most obvious difference is in the opening movement: a vast Adagio in the symphony, but a relatively brief Allegretto in the quartet that begins with a tongue-in-cheek melody in the vein of the composer's Ninth Symphony. Shostakovich transforms this material into something considerably more urgent and agitated by the end of its development, setting up the biting scherzos that follow; and the Adagio fourth movement, the heart of the work, is a deeply felt lament that, whatever its source in Shostakovich himself, clearly evokes the tragedy of the just-ended war.

Its chief theme returns as the climax of the Finale, which echoes too the return of the Adagio in the last movement of the Eighth Symphony (another Mahlerian device as well).

The Third Quartet possesses symphonic scope, and it's one of four Shostakovich quartets— the others being the Fourth, the Eighth and the Tenth— to have been reconfigured as "chamber symphonies" for string orchestra. The Borodin musicians, however, resisted the temptation, both here and in the Fifth Quartet that followed the intermission, to push the music beyond a chamber music context.

The Emerson's new insight

Western-based quartets, especially the Emerson Quartet, have tended to "symphonize" the Shostakovich quartets in their performances, emphasizing dynamic contrasts and dissonances while driving the rhythms hard. This approach has produced some new insights— particularly, for me, in the Shostakovich Fifth Quartet, where the Emerson produces in the Andante an effect that achieves the musical equivalent of a man banging his head against the wall— but at the cost of a certain excess.

The Borodin approach, most notably in the Fifth, might almost be called anti-Emersonian. This ensemble has, in its collective experience, accompanied virtually the entire span of the Shostakovich quartets from their inception to the present. So they are not in this sense "discovering" Shostakovich, as the West still is. He is already a classic for them, and listening to their Andante of the Fifth—the same music whose note of all-but suicidal despair at the seemingly endless persistence of the Stalin era the Emerson caught— I found myself thinking suddenly, "Why, this is as beautiful as Schubert!" Certainly that is one experience one does not have every day with Shostakovich.

A part of the Borodin's achievement is its fully integrated sound, although each of its musicians— particularly first violinist Ruben Aharanian and cellist Vladimir Balshin— stands out as an extraordinary artist.

Breathless Beethoven

Shostakovich's music is so compact with irony and ambiguity that there is never a single definitive way to perform it, and I would not want to do without the dimensions the Emerson Quartet (and, latterly, the Jerusalem Quartet, which has just completed a Shostakovich cycle in New York) have brought to it. But Shostakovich, particularly toward the end of his life, saw himself as the inheritor of a great tradition, and it's to that sense that the Borodin speaks.

Partly for this very reason, the Beethoven Grosse Fuge seemed in some ways the most startlingly modern piece on the program. It's an utterly unyielding work that scarcely pauses for breath in its 17-minute span. Although it was originally designed as the last movement of the Quartet in B Flat, Op. 130, Beethoven's publisher persuaded him to detach it and substitute a modest finale more in keeping with the proportions of the score's other five movements, and so the "Great Fugue" now most often appears on its own as a monstre sacré.

It doesn't really stand beside anything else in the history of Western music; like Bach's Art of the Fugue, Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is its own Alp. The Borodin gave it a tightly focused performance that brought the audience to its feet. Let's not wait 15 years to invite them back again.