For more than seventy years, the Borodin Quartet has been celebrated for its insight and authority in the chamber music repertoire. The ensemble’s cohesion and vision have survived successive changes in personnel, thanks not least to the common legacy shared by its members from their training at the Moscow Conservatory. The current members of the Quartet are Ruben Aharonian, Sergei Lomovsky, Igor Naidin and Vladimir Balshin. Highlights in 2016/17 included performances in London, Lyon, Bilbao, Pamplona, Madrid, Essen, Brugge, Miami, Puerto Rico, Bogotá, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Budapest, and Moscow, as well as a tour of China.

Described by the Daily Telegraph Australia as “the Russian grand masters,” the Borodin Quartet’s particular affinity with Russian repertoire is based on constant promotion, performances and recording of the pillars of Russian string quartet music. Their Boise debut program will include Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 6, Tchaikovsky’s Quartet No. 1, and the great unknown Nikolai Myaskovsky’s String Quartet No. 13, a lushly neo-Romantic Russian work championed by the Borodins. The Quartet is universally recognized for its genuine interpretation of Russian music, generating critical acclaim all over the world; the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes about them “here we have not four individual players, but a single sixteen-stringed instrument of great virtuosity.”