Alexander Borodin is best known as the composer of the Symphony in B minor, the symphonic sketch “In the Steppes of Central Asia” and the opera “Prince Igor”, which he left unfinished at his sudden death in 1887. It is less well known that in Russia he is regarded as the “father of the Russian string quartet”. Unlike his fellows in “The Five”, the composer, who never had a systematic training, held chamber music in special esteem; at barely 14 he wrote a string trio, at 17 a piano trio. The piano quintet is the last work of this early chamber music period. In the summer of 1861 a chemistry research assignment took the doctor of medicine to Heidelberg, where he met the Russian pianist Jekaterina; making music together and concerts in Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Mannheim and Pisa acquainted him with works by Chopin and Schumann.
The Quintet for 2 Violins, Viola, Cello and Piano was written at the beginning of 1862 and, like so many of Borodin’s works, remained unprinted until 1938. In the first movement the piano introduces, in octave unison, a cantabile theme that floats strangely through its alternation of triple and duple time and whose Aeolian colouring in F minor sounds distinctly Slavic; the second theme seems like a “song without words” version of it. The Scherzo sends its first theme through the parts in fugato fashion, starting from the viola, and turns the comic second theme into a pianistic showpiece. The Finale opens elegiacally in C minor, brings an episode close to Mendelssohn and a little “Chopiniade”, rises to a hymnic climax and fades away in pianissimo.
Borodin and Schostakowitsch are also linked biographically: a Borodin scholarship, arranged by Alexander Glasunow, enabled the impoverished Schostakowitsch to continue his studies at the Petersburg Conservatory in the years after the Revolution. In Leningrad he also wrote his Quintet for 2 Violins, Viola, Cello and Piano Op. 57 in 1940, at a time of extreme danger for artists: since Stalin had left a performance of “Lady Macbeth” early in 1935 and the party press had written of “chaos instead of music” in 1936, Schostakowitsch felt particularly threatened. The quintet brought a turning point: after its triumphant premiere in Moscow in November 1940 by the Beethoven Quartet with the composer at the piano, it received the newly created Stalin Prize First Class on 16 March 1941.
The piano opens the Prelude with an almost solemn chordal gesture; attacca follows a large-scale Fugue on a halting, elegiac modal theme in the soft sound of muted strings. After the dance-like, robust Scherzo and a meditative Intermezzo, the music glides almost imperceptibly into the cheerful Finale. Thomas Leander, born in Düsseldorf in 1960, studied with Herbert Drechsel, Paul Badura-Skoda and Geoffrey Parsons and was appointed professor at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf in 1995. The Minguet-Quartett, founded in 1988, was coached for many years by Walter Levin; here its members are Ulrich Isfort and Annette Reisinger (violin), Irene Schwalb (viola) and Matthias Diener (cello). The recording was made from 17 to 19 December 1997 in the Festhalle in Viersen.