Borodin String Quartet

String Quartet No 10 in A flat Op 118 - Shostakovich

String Quartet No 11 in F minor Op 122 - Shostakovich

String Quartet No 12 in D flat Op 133 - Shostakovich

The three quartets of the penultimate instalment of the Borodin Quartet's Shostakovich cycle were all written and premiered between 1964 and 1968. This was a period when the composer, secure in the comfort of his third marriage, and with the enormously successful, autobiographical Eighth Quartet behind him, was in experimental mode.

For Shostakovich, experiment was not going to result in the ground-breaking sort of work that was produced in the 1960s by younger Soviet composers like Arvo Part and Alfred Schnittke, who dared to dally with "decadent" Western techniques, let alone the style of string quartet that came from the pens of Penderecki and Lutoslawski in more liberal Poland, or the unfettered avant-gardists working in the West.

In Shostakovich, the edges become less smooth, the lateral stretching of harmonic logic more extended, the vertical clashes more extreme. The Twelfth Quartet even employs 12-tone material (though without for a moment deigning to be a 12-tone piece), and allows some serious triplet disruption of the familiar rhythmic tics. Those triplets serve to remind one quite how restricted, for all its energy and metric sleight of hand, the rhythmic content of Shostakovich's music actually is.

But it's the work's gestural manner that seems most forward-looking. The composer is, as it were, trying out modes and moods for style and fit, almost like a foretaste of what, in less than a decade, would develop in the music of Schnittke as poly-stylism.

The Borodin Quartet continued to maintain its phenomenally persuasive delivery in the works of this transitional stage in Shostakokovich's output of quartets. If they prettified a single detail, pulled a curtain to let sunlight fall where it was not intended, or indulged the normal sensualities of string playing at the expense of the music, I did not spot it.

This is not meant to suggest that the quartet's playing is without beauty, lightness or sensual allure, merely that there's a focused gravitas about the performances that pays unfailing respect to the music's recursive obsessions of pattern and mood.

Due to a production error, the final review from the Shostakovich festival in Bantry House was published before the one above, which is the penultimate one.