Borodin Quartet 2014

Next year Musica Viva and the renowned Borodin Quartet share a 70th anniversary.

For Musica Viva the past years have been a time of bringing the greatest performers to tour Australia; for the Quartet it has been a time of constantly astonishing audiences with the beauty and intelligence of their playing.

The Quartet will perform works by Beethoven, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky at their Canberra concert on October 2 at Llewellyn Hall. The violist, Igor Naidin, says that they are so happy to be coming back.

"It has become a bit of a tradition playing down under in Australia every four years," he says, "but  as well as touring with the Quartet, I've also participated in the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition as both a competitor and a jury member."

For this tour there's a new member of the quartet – new to Australia that is, although second violinist Sergei Lomovsky has already been playing with the quartet now for more than three years, replacing Andrei Abramenkov.

"Our dear colleague, who played with us on our tour in 2010, had played with the group for almost 40 years," Naidin says, "and he asked us to release him. We had to find a gap in our schedule while we tried to find the most fitting replacement."

Like any ensemble, the Borodin had developed what Naidin terms "our own sound" and it took a little while to find the perfect replacement for Abramenkov. "We invited one or two people to sit down and rehearse with us and it soon became obvious who would work out or not," Naidin says. "An audience picks up the sound that defines an ensemble, so the four [instrumental] voices must work well together. They must produce a sound that will be loved by audiences."

When I talked with Naidin more than four years ago, he had no favourite composer , "except the one that I'm playing at any particular time". But the quartet members all agree that since the time of Haydn and Mozart, the string quartets of Beethoven and Shostakovich have been unexcelled by any other works of this genre. They always try to include a work by each of these composers in any concert and they have recorded all of the quartets of both Beethoven and Shostakovich.

In the Quartet's possession are manuscripts of Shostakovich's quartets annotated by the composer himself. "Shostakovich is part of our quartet life," Naidin says "Back in the '50s and  '60s while he was alive, he gave directions to our quartet members about how the music should be played. The quartet was playing for the composer's approval, to his wishes. We have this heritage."

First on the Canberra program will be Beethoven's String Quartet in G major, op 18 no.2. It has the nickname "the Komplimentier-quartett" from the German 'quartet of bows and curtseys' Haydn's String Quartet no. 1 op 77 also had this nickname, "but Beethoven, in a letter, rather crustily denied that his quartet owed anything to Haydn's quartet," Naidin says. "It's a remarkable piece  though – very classical Viennese."

The chosen Shostakovich work is his String Quartet no. 8 in C minor, op.110. "It's perhaps his most known quartet," Naidin says. "It's so powerful and so well-known to audiences, that we felt it would be most appropriately included in this program."

And why is this work so popular when it's often described as gloomy or melancholy?

"Maybe because it's a combination of Shostakovich's strongest and most open emotions," Naidin says. "It's not only in memory of the victims of fascism but also, in a way, Shostakovich's own memorial. Each of his quartets is an absolute masterpiece. The variety of his work was phenomenal: symphonies, operas, film music. He was able to compose in any style."

Naidin believes that Tchaikovsky's String Quartet no.2 in F major, op.22, the third work on the program, is one of the masterpieces of Russian string quartet repertoire and  another very powerful piece.

"For our forthcoming 70th anniversary, we wanted to include not only Russian music but a work that the Borodin Quartet has been playing to Russian audiences for the past 70 years. It's very powerful and tragic and strong. We love it and we hope that Australian audiences will like it, too."

He says that it is an exhausting work to perform, "impossible to play without being emotionally involved".

The program to be played in Adelaide and Perth and at one of the two Melbourne concerts includes different works by Beethoven and Shostakovich, as well as Schubert's "Death and the Maiden"  string quartet.

"We hope that Australian audiences will appreciate the genius of all these composers," Naidin says.