MUSIC REVIEW : Borodin Quartet Offers a Refined Program

The Borodin Quartet returned to Ambassador Auditorium Thursday for a gloriously frustrating, uncategorizeable performance. Only the ensemble’s mellow mastery linked--in very different ways--string quartets by Mozart, Webern and Shostakovich.

The veteran group--violist Dmitri Shebalin and cellist Valentin Berlinsky go back to its founding in 1946; violinists Mikhail Kopelman and Andrei Abramenkov joined in the ‘70s--has always been associated with Shostakovich, and on their last visits to Ambassador in 1988 played the whole cycle of 15 quartets.

No. 5 is hardly the darling of the set, but the Borodins made it sound important, smoothing out the motivic mechanics in the outer movements and keeping everything in perfect balance. They put a remarkable sheen on the despairing song of the middle movement, and returned to this utterly idiosyncratic sort of frozen heat for the smiling-through-tears benediction.

They continued--after long applause--with Shostakovich in encore, providing more muted despair and then astonishing vaudeville buffoonery in the Elegy and Polka arrangements from “Lady Macbeth” and “The Age of Gold.”

The program had peaked, however, in the taut, endlessly expressive playing of Webern’s Five Pieces. The Borodin integration and unique sound, hovering at the feathery threshold of audibility, made a cohesive, utterly poignant and pointed argument from these miniatures.

Nothing ruffled the endlessly suave ensemble of the Borodins. They could be provoked to outbursts of violence or humor, but the abiding impression they left was of almost repressive control.

That produced what must be the most placid, uncompromisingly low-key account ever of Mozart’s D-minor Quartet, K. 421, opening the concert. The effort was endlessly elegant, but at a terrible price. All the movements were taken at a moderate pace and dynamic level, and finished off with abrupt disinterest. The aim may have been understated drama, but the result was bland didacticism.