Borodin Quartet

Here's the opening section.

It's about 13 minutes long, and in this recording from 1980, Richter is joined by members of the Borodin Quartet and the double bass player Georg Hertnagel.

It's hard to get a bigger contrast from Schubert's final sonata I played you some of earlier in the show.

This music has a sunny joy to it, and to me it also feels like you can hear a very happy side to Sviatoslav Richter.

Thank you.

That was the opening section of Franz Schubert's Trout Piano Quintet.

Richter was joined by members of the Borodin Quartet and the bass player Georg Hertnagel.

Richter's increasing enjoyment of making music with small groups of performers led him to establish chamber music festivals in France in 1964 and in Moscow in 1981.

Then happened an extraordinary story again where my uncle did something unbelievable in my returning to that instrument.

He was very good friends with the Borodin Quartet, especially with the cellist, Valentin Berlinsky.

And so he arranged through him that they would do the following.

The second violinist, Andrei Abramenkov, he took my violin to play the whole US tour.

You went through customs in Moscow on the way out, and on Moscow on the way in, whether you brought it, and this and that and the other.

Of course, there were some very often traveling artists who did that all the time, and they were recognized even by the custom people.

So they had an easier time because they'd say, "Oh, yeah, that's, uh, David Oistrakh coming back," or Leonid Kogan or whatever, or, or the Borodin Quartet.

And because they traveled so much, they didn't check.