60 years and still pulling the heartstrings

Billing itself as “the world’s longest-lived string quartet,” the Borodin Quartet is now celebrating its 60th anniversary, an amazing record of survival among groups that are often likened to complex, multi-partnered marriages. Even more rare, 80-year-old cellist Valentin Berlinsky, an original member of the ensemble, is still performing.

He and his colleagues, violinists Ruben Aharonian and Andrei Abramenkov and violist Igor Naidin, played a three-part Russian program Saturday at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.

Their playing was typically light in touch (their fortissimos were other groups’ mezzo fortes), refined in ensemble and unified in expression. No one pushed himself forward, nor over-dramatized the music. There was drama, but the audience had to meet the musicians at least halfway to hear it.

They opened the program with Tchaikovsky’s lean and surprisingly dissonant Second Quartet. It was only in the heartfelt andante that familiar expressive depths were sounded, but even so, there was a reserve to the playing.

Stravinsky’s pithy, compacted, character-full “Three Pieces for String Quartet,” which followed, was composed in 1914, and it cleaned the 19th century sonic palette, demanding -- and rewarding -- alert attention.

But it was Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 3, the single work on the second half of the program, that traversed the greatest emotional distance. Composed in 1946, the postwar piece started off with a deceptively light little dance that occasionally edged toward a sense of sarcasm.

Things deepened over the next two movements -- a march fixated over a short rhythmic figure, followed by a more conflicted and agitated struggle. But the complex final movement depicted the true sense of loss and desolation experienced by the war’s survivors, with the violin frailly ascending the heights to close the piece in silence.