Newsday, April 2005

Now celebrating its 60th anniversary, the Borodin Quartet bills itself as "the world's longest-lived string quartet," with founding cellist Valentin Berlinsky still anchoring the ensemble. The Borodin offered an impressive program of Russian music Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, carrying on the group's tradition of searching, quietly powerful music-making.

The concert opened with Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 2 (1874), an odd work that commingles meandering harmonies, tripping dance rhythms, and urgent but inconclusive melodic gestures.

There was an easy precision to the Borodin's playing in the first movement, their lean, astringent sound allowing listeners to savor Tchaikovsky's unexpected layering of dissonances.

The group's unshowy virtuosity came to the fore in the quartet's scherzo, a thing of lithe, enchanting grace, and in the andante, where Berlinsky shaped Tchaikovsky's warm, throbbing melodies with eloquence and wove an uneasy pulse beneath his colleagues' lyrical effusions. The ensemble brought a rascally, scampering energy to the quartet's amiable finale.

While Tchaikovsky's quartet respects the genre's niceties, Igor Stravinsky's knotty, blisteringly intense Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914) explode the medium's formal conventions and sound-palette. As played by the Borodin, the opening note—shockingly hollow and metallic—gave way to a galumphing, gloriously rude dance. The second piece, an homage to a circus clown of Stravinsky's day, juxtaposed glassy, whistling phrases, wild plucked notes and feathery strokes, while the somber, chorale-like third piece, filled with shadows, simply dissolved.

A single work comprised the program's second half: the String Quartet No. 3 (1946) by Dmitri Shostakovich, who forged a close relationship with the Borodin over the years. Scholars believe that Shostakovich used numerical codes in his music, with the number three representing the Russian people, and the number two evoking the tyranny of Stalin's regimeperhaps even the knock on the door that Shostakovich and other artists who challenged Soviet pieties so dreaded.

Nonetheless, as with Dante, Bach and other towering artists who employed similar schemes, one's awareness of the technique melts before the inspired use to which it is put. In the hands of the Borodin, the quartet's spry opening immediately went bad, its trills sounding nervous and incongruous. In the second movement, a grinding, march-like rhythm stomped out shy, forlorn phrases of melting beauty.

The Borodin lavished upon the quartet's fourth movement playing of heart-stopping power: phrases of icy desolation from first violinist Ruben Aharonian, a warm yet ominous duet between Berlinsky and violist Igor Naidin. They brought a ghostly quality to the seemingly sprightly melody that opens the final movement, whose swirling developments took queasily chromatic turns.

A shimmering thread of sound in the violin's highest register sighed into silence, bringing to an end a concert and a work of extraordinarily concentrated expression.

THE BORODIN QUARTET. Music by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. Attended Saturday at the 92nd Street Y's Kaufmann Concert Hall. For information on future events, visit www.92y.org or call 212-415-5500.