MUSIC REVIEWS : BORODIN TRIO CONCERT AT THE WILSHIRE EBELL

A musical score is no more than a mere skeleton--that fact has been pretty well established by now. But hearing both the Borodin Trio and an ad-hoc group from the Los Angeles Philharmonic play the same work within four days can illuminate that notion.

Such was the comparative object lesson given Wednesday at the Wilshire Ebell, where the Music Guild presented the celebrated Russian ensemble. The score in question, Mendelssohn’s D-minor Trio, here took on a warm, burnished glow and seemed more the fireside reminiscences of old friends than the wildly surging, impetuous thing it had been several nights earlier.

There’s hardly a mystery in what happened. The Borodin Trio--violinist Rostislav Dubinsky, pianist Luba Edina (his wife) and cellist Uli Turovsky--has been communing on intimate musical matters and fine-tuning a style of interaction for 10 years. Not a hemidemisemiquaver has been overlooked.

So it came as no real surprise to hear these artists encompass Mendelssohn’s youthful extremes--his songful innocence and heady wonder--in suavely introspective (some might even say lugubrious) terms. The Andante, for instance, attained a nearly reverent state.

But it was the Borodin’s utter cohesiveness, a marvel to experience, that partly determined this quest for depth. Textures of tone, gorgeous individually, were blended to perfection. No passage, even the fastest, left any straggling. Expertly dovetailed phrases took on apt elegance without sacrificing affect. Structure was consistently emphasized.

The same held true for the two program bookends, works by the Czech composers Smetana and Dvorak that, true to the Borodin penchant, were also cast in the minor key.

In Smetana’s G-minor Trio, which began the evening, each member of the ensemble had choice opportunities for displaying his/her considerable virtuosity. Edina, courtesy of a Hamburg Steinway, proved herself a remarkably sensitive pianist. Both Dubinsky and Turovsky leaned into the string, imbuing every phrase with meaning. As a result, this rather non-idiomatic work received the full measure of its symphonic implications.

For Dvorak’s “Dumky” Trio, a sense of deliberation made for aggressive contrasts between evanescent mysteries and rhythmic folkisms--thanks to the Borodin’s extraordinary polish and subtlety that let these qualities shine through.