This formidable concert marked the start of a complete cycle of Shostakovich and Beethoven quartets in a Wigmore Hall series over the next two years. The Borodin Quartet, who are celebrating their 70th anniversary, remain the gold standard for Russian chamber music and the Russian approach. And, sure enough, as soon as they put bow to string in Shostakovich’s 10th Quartet in A flat, from 1964, one felt as though this was very much the way the composer heard the piece.
Like the other two quartets in this programme, the 10th begins sparely and sombrely, and at a meditative pulse. The Borodins gripped the piece from the start, with the sinister little viola triplets emphasising the troubled nature of the dark reflections in the other strings. The playing was rich-toned and dramatic, in ways that seemed authentically Russian, and the technique was formidable.
The 10th was followed by the String Quartet No 8 in C minor, from 1960, the cornerstone work of Shostakovich’s reputation as a quartet writer. Not everything he wrote can be reduced to encoded dissidence against the Soviet system, but in a performance as authoritative as this, the autobiographical preoccupations were hard to deny. Everything in the piece, from the stark statement of Shostakovich’s much-repeated motto theme at the beginning, through the hysteria of the second movement, built towards the unresolved self-questioning of the final movement, which died away into a long silence.
If the playing in the Shostakovich half of the programme sounded vernacular, the forceful old-school approach of Beethoven’s C sharp minor quartet Op 131 in the second half was a culture shock. The Borodins’ technical mastery was also striking, but the full-toned playing began to feel unrelenting. It added up to a fiercer and more propulsively confident performance of the work than one normally hears. An interesting perspective, for sure but certainly not the last word.
