Customer Review(s)
Customer Rating:  Summary: Buy this cd or live to regret it. Comment: It's stupidly inexpensive, it's TWO discs, it should be badly recorded garbage.
And it's absolutely brilliant.
Amazing music, performed with consummate skill and musicality.
Customer Rating:  Summary: Mellow and relaxed -- perhaps not the best anymore Comment: I respect the five-star reviews here, but for me this super-bargain selection of Shostakovich quartets sounds a bit tame. One must grant that the Borodin Qt. has long been acclaimed for its readings of these works, but there were two previous sets, one from 1967-71 with the original members (available on Chandos), another from 1978-83 with a new first and second violinist after the emigration of the two original members (recorded by Melodiya, licensed in the West to EMI and BMG). Both are acknowledged as nearly definitive, even though the earleir set lacks the last two quartets, #14 and #15, which had yet to be composed.
These 1990 performances, recorded at the Maltings, Snape in nice digital sound, are typical of the Borodins in their later phase: they sound accomplished, relaxed, and highly experienced. Those are all pluses, and yet when one turns to the competiiton, which is fierce, one hears more drama, commitment, and virtuosity in the Emerson Qt., while at super-budget there is the Shostakovich Qt., who have mastered the idiom within a hair's breadth of their more famous compatriots. In other words, I don't think the later Borodins quite measure up to their earlier selves or to the best of what came after.
Having said that, there's a settled, autumnal quality to these recordings that will always appeal to listeners. Customer Rating: Summary: sheer brilliance and range, brilliantly performed Comment: These five Shostakovich string quartets were recorded by the Borodin Quartet in London in 1990, and the performance and recording are absolutely brilliant, to match the compositions. (The earlier complete cycle of 15 quartets, recorded in the 1980s by an earlier line-up of the Borodins, is no longer available.)
Quartets 2 and 3, which open and close this set, were written respectively in 1944 and 1946, expressions of DSCH in his prime, during the war and its immediate aftermath. They are among his finest works, too rich in mood and style to summarize briefly. The 8th Quartet of 1960 is his best known, and it was publicly dedicated to "the victims of war and fascism." Of course the interpretation of that phrase by the Soviet officials was at variance with what we now know to be DSCH's view. I heard the Kronos Quartet recording (on BLACK ANGELS) before this one -- by comparison it is harder-edged, emphasizing the bitter rage at the perpetrators, while the Borodin recording emphasizes grief and quiet desolation. Or in other words, the Kronos recording is strong in the louder passages, while the Borodin recording is more expressive and convincing in the slower, quieter passages, which predominate. The 7th Quartet (also of 1960), in honor of Shostakovich's first wife Nina, who died in 1954, is in three movements, and concludes with a powerful raging allegro. Finally, the 12th Quartet, completed in 1968, is in two movements. It can here be seen to represent the "late quartets," 12-15, all of which are dark works written as Shostakovich's health failed and he was in and out of hospitals. The 12th is a powerful, memorable work that continues to show an amazing range, the baring of a complex soul.
Along with the best of Shostakovich's symphonies, his best string quartets are among the finest music of the 20th century, and should be heard by absolutely all music-lovers. Though chronologically later, this is not music that extends the radical innovations of Schoenberg (and Bartok's string quartets). Shostakovich's music is not exactly neo-classical, or neo-romantic, but the modernist elements in his work are integrated seamlessly into a mainly tonal, lyrical conception that makes it more acceptable to the average concert-goer than the music of many of DSCH's contemporaries in the West. Dark and gloomy, yes, but not a radical departure from "the classical tradition."
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