59.00 PLN

CD:

Nr kat.: BBCL4063
Label  : BBC Legends

"These Edinburgh Festival recordings show a great quartet on top form" Gramophone Inscribed August 29-31, 1962 in the Leath Town Hall at the Edinburgh Festival, the three quartets on this disc testify to the rigorous, propulsive discipline of the Borodin String Quartet, here making its debut in Britain. Their sound is serene, severe, and driven in unsentimental, literalist lines. The Eighth Quartet of Shostakovich (1960) formed part of intense summer of Russian music in Edinburgh, in which the Shostakovich Fourth Symphony and Twelfth Symphony had their British premiers. The quartet is a kind of spiritual autobiography of the composer, rife with his Schumannesque anagrams, allusions to his own works, and intimations of mortality. A musical cousin would be the Strauss Ein Heldenleben, except this wry and somber work plays like a desolate piece of T.S. Eliot’s poetry. Rudolf Barshai, the viola player with the group until 1953, orchestrated the five-movement work under the auspices of Shostakovich. The D Major Quartet of the ensemble’s namesake (they were originally the Moscow Philharmonic Quartet) has many wonderful moments for the cellist Valentin Berlinsky, especially in the well-trod Nocturne. The F Major Scherzo has a mercurial Mendelssohnian airiness, with the ensuing waltz enjoying a lilt that keeps it airborne as well. The last movement, with its quirky antiphons and staggered part-writing, may owe debts to Beethoven’s Op. 135. Most felicitous is the Borodin Quartet’s rendition of the Ravel F Major Quartet (1902), where finesse and coloristic dexterity conspire to paint ravishing pictures in sound. With the production of BBC Legends in some kind of hiatus, we collectors have the opportunity to catch up on the treasures that might otherwise have got away. –Gary Lemco