The town of Kuhmo is situ­ated in the north­east of Fin­land. Every Ju­ly, it plays host to a cham­ber mu­sic fest­iv­al which is at­ten­ded by dozens of artists from all over the world. Cre­ativ­ity blos­soms in the in­form­al at­mo­sphere and glor­i­ous sur­round­ings of the lakeside town, with the mid­night sun length­en­ing the days to ac­com­mod­ate packed re­hears­al and per­form­ance sched­ules. The fest­iv­al has be­come in­ter­na­tion­ally renowned while main­tain­ing its own very spe­cial and in­di­vidu­al char­ac­ter. It is a haven for per­formers and con­cert-go­ers with an un­in­hib­ited pas­sion for mu­sic-mak­ing.

In 2002, the Borod­in Quar­tet was among the top-flight artists to make an ap­pear­ance. The Borod­in Quar­tet is un­doubtedly one of the ma­jor string quar­tets of our day. It was foun­ded in 1945 and cel­list Valentin Ber­l­in­sky has been with the Quar­tet since its earli­est days, while vi­ol­in­ist An­drei Ab­ra­men­kov joined over twenty years ago.

With vi­ola play­er Ig­or Naid­in and vi­ol­in­ist Ruben Aharoni­an join­ing in 1996, the Quar­tet has con­tin­ued to re­ceive crit­ic­al ac­claim. Their par­tic­u­lar af­fin­ity to Rus­si­an rep­er­toire was stim­u­lated by their early close re­la­tion- ship with Shos­takovich, who per­son­ally su­per­vised their study of each of his quar-tets. Widely re­garded as defin­it­ive per­form­ances, the Quar­tet has giv­en Shos­takovich cycles in many ma­jor cit­ies throughout the world.

Shos­takovich
String Quar­tet No. 1 in C Op. 49, 16 min.
String Quar­tet No. 8 in C minor Op. 110, 23 min.
String Quar­tet No. 15 in E flat minor Op. 144, 44 min.

Tchaikovsky
Quar­tet Move­ment in B flat, 14 min.
String Quar­tet No. 3 in E flat minor Op. 30, 40 min.
String Quar­tet No. 1 in D Op. 11, 29 min.
String Quar­tet No. 2 in F Op. 22, 37 min.

Borod­in
String Quar­tet No. 2 in D, 30 min.