Quartett Nr. 2 für 2 Violinen, Viola und Violoncello

Alexander Borodin

Borodin's two numbered string quartets, dating from the last fifteen years of his life, are still fundamentally salon-orientated, albeit on a more ambitious scale than his previous chamber works and reflecting lessons learned from the examples of Beethoven and Mendelssohn. The first quartet was explicitly 'inspired by a theme of Beethoven' (part of the replacement finale to the Große Fuge in the B flat major quartet, Op 130). Its doubly Germanic adoption of genre and theme did not go down well with Musorgsky or with Vladimir Stasov, the godfather and chief public advocate of the Mighty Handful. The String Quartet No 2 in D major, too, has a Beethoven connection, in that it was premiered at an Imperial Russian Musical Society concert in St Petersburg on 7 February 1882 (some sources say 9 March) alongside Beethoven's second 'Razumovsky' quartet. However, by this stage in his career,...