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Borodin Quartet raises goose-bumps

Posted by arts_reviews

Posted: March 5, 2007 - 10:37 am

By Maia Nolan
Daily News correspondent

Borodin Quartet

Russia’s legendary Borodin Quartet played Anchorage Saturday night, treating those in attendance to an evening that can only be described as breathtaking.

Anchorage Concert Association Executive Director Lisette Miles, in pre-performance remarks, touched on the importance of holding applause until the end of a piece. Thanks to Miles, the reverie between movements remained unbroken by ill-timed applause from well-meaning concertgoers.

And what a reverie it was. What was most remarkable about the Borodin Quartet’s performance may actually have been the moments at which the foursome wasn’t playing, or at least wasn’t playing loudly. One of the more amazing things about their performance of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 4 in D Major, Op. 83 was the quietness not only of the piece, but of the moment.

Buttery-rich close harmonies, inspired by Eastern European Jewish music, seemed to dissolve into the upper reaches of the Atwood Concert Hall. In the fourth movement, the quartet burst into a sudden fortissimo, heightening the spell, not breaking it, before fading back into a haunting, goosebump-inducing piano.

The quartet followed up the Shostakovich with Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95, a piece that makes effective use of negative space, moments of silence in which only the lingering reverberations of sound can be heard hanging in the air. The quartet maximized the impact of these moments, playing emphatically up to the rests and letting the audience absorb the almost-silence, haunted by the ghosts of notes just played.

The Beethoven had other strengths, too; the second movement, a rambling near-fugue, showcased all four artists at once, giving each a unique line to interweave with the others, and the piece ended with a frantic coda that, at its climax, prompted audible expressions of excitement from the audience.

The Borodin Quartet was founded in 1946 as the Moscow Philharmonic Quartet, and the group returned to its roots in the second half of the program with Tchaikovsky’s very melodic, very melancholy and very Russian String Quartet No. 3 in E Flat Minor, Op. 30. Cellist Valentin Alexandrovich Berlinsky, the quartet’s sole remaining founding member, seemed to smile at his dog-eared, marked-up sheet music like it was an old friend as he and his cohorts embarked on Tchaikovsky’s dolorous first movement.

If the first half of the program was characterized by its use of quietness and silence, the Tchaikovsky was notable for a sound that, at times, seemed bigger than the four instruments on the stage. There were moments, particularly during the allegro moderato movement, at which the group almost seemed to be backed by an invisible strings section.

I read somewhere recently that standing ovations have become more common in recent years, theoretically because in this modern era, audiences are desperate to connect more fully with their artistic experience. The honor that once was saved for only the most remarkable of performances is now bestowed almost as a matter of course.

But the standing ovation received by the Borodin Quartet on Saturday night was well and duly earned, as were the shouted demands for an encore — which were granted, graciously and unpretentiously, with an achingly beautiful performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Andante Cantabile.”