Borodin Quartet Still Has Magic

Now 53 years old, the Moscow-based Borodin Quartet remains one of our supreme musical resources, though not unchanged by the passage of time. In its latest local offering, a surpassingly serious program Tuesday evening for Chamber Music in Historic Sites, the group paid tribute to its original first violinist, Rostislav Dubinsky, who left the group in the 1970s and died last year.

The site was the Regal Biltmore Hotel’s Crystal Ballroom, which compromised its visual elegance with an industrial roar until the air conditioning was turned off at intermission. But the tri-generational ensemble--founding cellist Valentin Berlinsky; second violinist Andrei Abramenkov, who joined in 1975; and first violinist Ruben Aharonian and violist Igor Naidin, who both joined in 1996--wavered not at all.

Perhaps the key characteristic that has stayed constant across all the Borodin lineups is the conviction that lightness of touch is not incompatible with weight of expression. Witness the ethereal shades of poignancy and grace from which the current group spun the “Convalescent’s Devout Song of Thanksgiving” in Beethoven’s A-minor Quartet, Opus 132. There was nothing fey or feigned about this approach; it was a model of confidence in the music’s power and of the paradoxical strength of selflessness in the face of it.

Of course, the Borodins are not shy about swagger or placid faux-rusticity when called for, as they are in other movements of the Beethoven quartet. Their control of sound and ensemble nuance operates as well at high volume as at low, and they have a knack for matching harmonic and timbral colors.

They opened with the introspective sorrows of Mozart’s D-minor Quartet, K. 421 and the sweatier passions of Schubert’s Quartet Movement in C minor, D. 703. These disparate challenges revealed little apparent sympathy for period practice dogma, but vast reservoirs of focused tone and engaged spirit.