MUSIC REVIEW : Borodin Quartet Begins Shostakovich Cycle

The musical endurance test of the decade, for audience and performers--the presentation by the Borodin Quartet of Moscow of all 15 string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich--began Tuesday at Ambassador Auditorium.

This first of six programs devoted to the canon, being performed in toto for the first time in this country outside New York City, paired works by a mature composer new to the medium.

The wartime (1944) Second Quartet, a curious choice to open the series, is a tedious sprawl--overextended, repetitious, enervated--whereas the postwar (1946) Third, while hardly a miracle of conciseness, is as fine as anything in the canon: a detrivialized, often inward-directed version of the slightly earlier Ninth Symphony.

The composer begins the Third Quartet with one of his disingenuous folk dances, which broadens into a double fugue serving as prelude to one of Shostakovich’s sour jokes, a sort of hobbled waltz. What follows is a succession of whirling war dances with thundering ostinatos--Prokofiev caricatured?--and jagged little piping tunes interrupting vast, slow-moving lyric spans (it would be an exaggeration to call them melodies ).

Every aspect of Shostakovich’s form and sound was audible in these performances by the Borodin Quartet--violinists Mikhail Kopelman and Andrei Abramenkov, violist Dmitri Shebalin, cellist Valentin Berlinsky--an ensemble whose dedication to and control over this material is so complete as to give the listener the impression that the music is coming from its original source. Or even that the music could not exist without these very artists, who command a range of color and dynamics possibly without equal among today’s quartets.

The Ambassador audience, which filled better than half the auditorium--not bad considering the esoteric nature of the material--proved extraordinarily attentive during each of the lengthy outpourings and extraordinarily appreciative of the Borodin’s heroic effort at the program’s conclusion.