‘Borodin Quartet’

Meanwhile, the Borodin Quartet has been among the world's best for almost 80 years. The quartet was founded in 1945 by four students at the Moscow Conservatory, and since then various musicians have kept the quartet alive. Since their inception, the promotion of the string quartets of Russian composers has been their main focus. The quartet always enjoyed a good relationship with Dmitri Shostakovich, as he always accompanied the Borodin Quartet when rehearsing the string quartets. Today the quartet performs its Fifteenth String Quartet, its very last, in which he delivered a highly expressive quartet with a few building blocks and few musical materials. Lyrical counterpoint can be found in Tchaikovsky's First String Quartet which - if we are to believe what he wrote in his diary - is said to have moved the writer Lev Tolstoy to tears.