Quite aside from the famous Nocturne third movement that has developed a life of its own as a popular song, there is little in the string quartet repertoire that sounds as intrinsically Russian as Borodin's Second String Quartet.
This Russianness played to the Kopelman Quartet's main strengths in the second of the group's concerts as artists in residence at the Perth Festival. The quartet's performance was characterised by its warmth and generosity of tone and gently unhurried pacing, even if the intonation was not always quite what it might have been. Leader Mikhail Kopelman also contributed to the certain idiosyncrasy of the performance with his disconcerting tendency of stamping hard on the beautifully resonant concert-hall stage at key structural moments.
More standard Russian repertoire followed, as the quartet was joined by pianist Boris Berman for Shostakovich's Piano Quintet. This was a slightly odd performance; on the one hand there was the feeling of a good ensemble on autopilot; on the other there were moments where it had a rough edge-of-the-seat quality, emphasised by handfuls of wrong notes from Berman. It was, however, a performance that grew in strength as it progressed and it certainly didn't play down the work's brittle, ambiguous edge.
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