Unlike the long time Alexander Borodin invested in most of his major works, his String Quartet No. 2 in D major was composed during a short summer vacation in August 1881. Borodin, a doctor of chemistry and cellist, had met the pianist Ekaterina Protopopova twenty years earlier, during an internship in Heidelberg as a scientist. Married in 1883, he wanted to pay tribute to the discovery of his love of two decades with the quartet that was to become the most important of the only two he composed for the genre.
The "secondary" vocation
Brief is the chamber music that Borodin wrote. The complete list of his corpus is also short. The illegitimate son of a Russian prince, the author of the popular Polovtsian Dances had access
to a privileged education that allowed him to spend most of his life as a chemistry professor at the medical academies in St. Petersburg. So music was always his secondary vocation, which did not prevent him from being part of the famous group known as The Five, Russian nationalist musicians who, by the way, did not look favorably on chamber music.
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| A. Borodin (1833 - 1887) |
String Quartet No. 2 - Nocturne
The complete work lasts about half an hour. Structured in the traditional manner for the typical string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello), its four movements (scherzo and andante embraced by two agile outer sections) brim with warmth and bliss, reflecting the fact
that this is the work of a man in love who lacks nothing, and where, apparently, the cello sings for Alexander and the first violin for Ekaterina.
The third movement, andante, and entitled Nocturne, is the one
that has made the quartet popular and captivated a wide audience. Numerous versions proliferate in the most diverse art circles; in 2006, a Disney Studios animated short film made full use of the famous andante.
The rendition is by musicians of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York.
