MUSIC REVIEW : The Balance of the Borodins

In chamber music as in so much else, there is something of a generational change under way. But the veterans of the Borodin Quartet gave object lessons in ensemble playing Wednesday at the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre.

Not even their astonishing finesse, however, could hide the unevenness of imagination in Tchaikovsky’s infrequently heard Quartet No. 3, in E-flat minor. Except in the third movement elegy, the music often seemed just a sketch of promising tunes floating in bare, pedestrian textures.

The Borodin players--violinists Mikhail Kopelman and Andrei Abramenkov, violist Dimitri Shebalin and cellist Valentin Berlinsky--seized those melodic opportunities with eloquent, keenly focused passion. The violinists had some clashes over pitch, surprising in this supremely accomplished context, but otherwise the ensemble worked integrated wonders.

Brahms’ Third Quartet, in B-flat, was composed the year before Tchaikovsky’s, and makes a complementary partner in many ways, not least in showing just how thoroughly the textural possibilities of the medium can be exploited. The Borodins probed it with sophisticated resources of bowing and dynamic scale.

Their sound, at least in the Ebell acoustic, could seem dry at times. But their pointed, unified delivery of all the nuances of the complex, highly interactive part writing more than compensated.

For Schubert’s “Quartettsatz” in C minor, the Borodins did unmask their full sonic arsenal, playing with heated grace and virtuosity. They projected its leaping, singing abandon with fluent, balanced zest.