Russian Quartet Impresses Audience at Ed Portal

A Russian quartet transported an audience to late 19th century St. Petersburg Wednesday evening at the Harvard Ed Portal in Allston.

The concert, organized by the Ed Portal in collaboration with the Ballets Russes Arts Initiative and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, featured the Rimsky-Korsakov String Quartet, a group that was formed in Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—in 1939.

Mikhail Bondarev and Ekaterina Belisova, two members of St. Petersburg’s Rimsky-Korsakov String Quartet, play during a group performance at the Harvard Ed Portal on Wednesday night. By Sidni M. Frederick

“It’s an all-Russian program tonight, some familiar composers, some less well-known, so it should be a really interesting program for those interested in classical music,” said Eva B. Rosenberg, the arts manager of the Ed Portal and an organizer of the event.

The musicians performed various selections from the Silver Age, a period of great cultural expansion centered in St. Petersburg which spanned from the last 15 years of the 19th century up until the Russian Revolution in 1917, according to Anna Winestein, the executive director of the Ballet Russes Arts Initiative.

“The Silver Age was a time of great experimentation and flowering in the visual arts and music, and in poetry,” Winestein said.

Though most forms of art were systematically suppressed during the Soviet era, art from the Silver Age has seen a revival in recent years, according to Winestein.

According to Winestein, “It is seen as one of the great high points of Russian culture historically, and is still an inspiration very much to Russian creativity today.”

The main program included works from Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Igor Stravinsky. Many in the audience reacted positively to not only the musicians, but also the emphasis on the Silver Age. Concertgoer John Miner, like others, was new to the music from the lesser known composers and to the artistic period.

“I had not heard the composers in the encore. I had certainly heard Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, and Tchaikovsky,” Miner said. “It was very nice to hear Russians play Russian music. I had this trust in them that they were playing an authentic sound.”

Bettina Norton, who said she was particularly fond of the Stravinsky, said the crowd was enthusiastic. “This audience was tremendously attentive, and it just points to the fact that when music is well-played, no matter what your background is, you recognize it.”

According to Rosenberg, this was the Ed Portal’s first collaboration of this kind. She said she hopes to plan more in the future “to reflect a broad audience and a wide portfolio of cultural interests.”