Borodin Quartet: Tchaikovsky String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2. Disc Review

This is the Borodin Quartet in 1987, with Mikhail Kopeiman as first violin, playing repertoire that all but courses through the musicians’veins. The Tchaikovsky is deeply liomantic, played with a plush velvet sound iiid a liquid melodic fluency, but imbued always with a sense of purpose that brings direction to even the most motoric of the composer’s writing.The players’ phrasing is frequently aided by an easy rubato, and their performances occasionally take greater liberties. As Tchaikovsky scurries energetically to his climaxes he is aided by some unscheduled accelerandos, balanced by hefty ritenutos elsewhere, while in the first movement of Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet the pulse comes from inside the music, and leaves the world of the metronome far behind.

In other hands, such fluctuations could be mannered and irritating; here they seem not only natural but essential.The many facets of Tchaikovsky’s music are all given glittering life, from the turmoil in some of the outer movements to the exquisite opening of the Scherzo of the Second Quartet.

There Is crisp, clean playing in Shostakovich’s Third Quartet, and the great threnody of the Adagio is a masterpiece of controlled passion and concentration, in the Eighth Quartet, the refinement that has marked so much of the playing is subsumed beneath a rawness both emotional and sometimes literal.The second movement is violent, the bows snapping against the strings, and there is a scarily neurotic intensity to the third.

The performances were fiimed in the neo-classical surroundings of Henry Wood Hall in London, with an added bleak backdrop for the Shostakovich.

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Classic Archive: Itzhak Perlman - Elgar, Prokofiev & Saint-Saens

I ‘ I’ Х great advantage of DVD Is the opportunity to watch players at short range, an advantage taken at its best in a top-quality recording, where, if you get fed up with fiddly camera angles, you can always just close your eyes.To that extent, these BBC recordings make a frustrating disc.The earliest recording here, of Saint-Saens’s Introduction et Rondo capriccioso. dates from 1970, followed by the Prokofiev in 1980 and the Elgar in 1981, and listening to such comparatively modern recordings in mono is somewhere between a tease and really annoying. The quality of the playing is, of course, phenomenal, with the odd fiuff of a live performance irrelevant in the context of playing by a man at the height of his abilities, his deep involvement In the music and his joy in performing it to an audience clear to see.

The Prokofiev, performed in an unidentified hall (the information given is minimal), sizzles, the pyrotechnics dispatched with jawdropping ease, the melodies quarried out of the instrument.The first movement of the Eigar Concerto, recorded at a Royal Albert Hall Prom, is taken at a cracking pace,all fire and virtuosity.The Andante, too, is on the brisk side, and for all the richness of the playing sounds as if it could have benefited from a little more room to breathe. The Saint-Saens is great fun.

Musically this is a rewarding DVD, given the caveat above, but the real joy of it is to watch the magic close-up - and still not be able to see how it’s done.

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