One of the world's longest-lasting and most revered string quartets, the Borodin Quartet from Russia, performs in Dunedin this Saturday as part of Arts Festival Dunedin 2014. Charmian Smith talks to viola player Igor Naidin.
Founded in 1945 in Moscow, the Borodin Quartet is one of the oldest quartets still playing.
The original members were colleagues and friends of Shostakovich, who consulted with them on each of his quartets, and they played at the funerals of both Stalin and Prokofiev.
Now, almost 70 years later, the quartet's present members, Ruben Aharonian, Sergei Lomovsky, Igor Naidin and Vladimir Balshin, come from a new generation, yet they have remained true to their roots.
Although the members have changed over the years, they have changed one by one, which allows them to absorb and follow the quartet's performance style, Igor Naidin said in a phone interview from Australia.
''It's obvious after a couple of rehearsals if a new player doesn't manage to fit in,'' he said.
All the members, from 1945 on, have been students of the Moscow Conservatory, many of them taught by older members, as Naidin was.
''We were brought up with the Borodin Quartet heritage before becoming a member of the group. When I was a student in the 1980s and '90s the most often attended concerts were by the Borodin Quartet. I was a student of some of them and we played together as young students,'' he said.
The quartet plays a lot of Russian music, and in this tour of concerts for Chamber Music New Zealand it is performing a work by Nicolai Myaskovsky, who is likely to be unfamiliar to New Zealand audiences.
Myaskovsky (1881-1950), like many other Soviet composers of the time, was overshadowed by contemporaries Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Naidin said.
Myaskovsky's String Quartet No 13 is a late work written shortly before his death. In a late Romantic style, it's impassioned and stirring, showing the heritage of his teacher, Glazunov.
This is followed by a short work, Shostakovich's String Quartet No 11, a deep, dark and emotionally intimate piece written in 1966, less than a decade before his death in 1975.
It is one of his most personal and emotional works, a crumbling, disintegrating memorial to lost happiness, dedicated to the memory of one of his close friends.
The final work in the concert is also a late quartet, Beethoven's Quartet in B flat Op 130.
Naidin describes it as an extended musical journey as it is symphonic in scale.
The work pushes the limits of expression and is considered by many to be the greatest of Beethoven's late quartets.
It was commissioned by, and dedicated to Russian Prince Nicolai Galitzin.
Naidin describes the programme as sophisticated and says chamber music lovers will appreciate it. Audiences for chamber music and particularly for string quartets are special, dedicated and elite, whether in provincial America, Russia or the Far East, he says.
