Borodin String Quartet plays Shostakovitch: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 8

Shostakovich came relatively late to the string quartet; his First Quartet postdates his Fifth Symphony. But his voice was fully formed, and the freshness, originality and formal power of this debut quartet laid the foundations for a cycle that evolved into one of the supreme achievements of 20th-century chamber music, with the pole-axing String Quartet No. 8 standing at its centre as one of the composer's finest achievements in the genre. As the pre-eminent Russian chamber ensemble of their era, the Borodin String Quartet had a close personal relationship with the composer, and these performances of the quartet from the 2002 Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland have an authority derived from decades of immersion in Shostakovich's music.