Borodin Quartet Delivers Gems in ‘Miniature’ Packages

Short, sweet and--when expressively necessary--mildly sour, the estimable Borodin Quartet’s program Sunday at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall qualified as an unusual refreshment. Not that the likes of Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Stravinsky stretch the definitions of normality: It was the matter of scale that gave an air of novelty to the program called “Russian Miniatures.”

All told, the quartet maneuvered through 34 discrete musical modules and took more than its share of bows--well deserved, at that. What might have seemed a bitty and episodic affair instead triumphed in good, virtuosic hands.

The famed quartet, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, wasn’t entirely intact. Ailing violist Dmitri Shebalin was subbed very ably by the Moscow String Quartet’s Tatiana Kokhanovskaia. Violinists Mikhail Kopelman and Andrei Abramenkov and cellist Valentin Berlinsky lived up to a formidable reputation.

Consuming the first half, Tchaikovsky’s thoroughly engaging “Children’s Album,” written for piano and arranged for the quartet, has a kaleidoscopic splendor neatly showcasing the composer’s tunesmithing gift, with no romantic fat. The quartet gave the work an apt Russian rusticity.

From namesake composer Borodin came “Notturno,” which, thanks to its adaptation as a hit tune in “Kismet,” is hard to appreciate beyond its latter-day Broadway bathos.

This program’s hardiest revelation was the reading of Stravinsky’s 1914 Three Pieces for String Quartet, a rugged yet cerebral concoction woven with polytonal strands and charged with a restive modernist spirit seemingly left over from “Rite of Spring.” Alfred Schnittke’s 1971 “Canon in memoriam Igor Stravinsky” consists of a series of mournful long tones that soar or collide into terse chords.

After these moving works, the remaining program was somewhat anticlimactic, if rendered with typical boldness. Shostakovich’s Elegy and Polka closed things on a fizzily ironic note--a pizzicato-filled polka laced with broad humor.