Valentin Berlinsky was the cellist with one of the great string ensembles of the 20th century, the Borodin Quartet. His tenure with the group, with whom he performed nearly 5,000 concerts, lasted from 1945 to 2007 and was believed to be one of the longest relationships between one man and one quartet in musical history. His impeccable stewardship of the ensemble through 11 changes of personnel led to the creation of a well-respected outift, one that became a jewel in the Soviet Union’s cultural cap. The quartet was often sent out into the world to show off the nation’s musical gems and in 1953 it was summoned to perform at the funeral of Stalin — as well as at that of Prokofiev’s later the same day.

As founding members fell away or defected, Berlinsky became the quartet’s unofficial spokesman and father figure, the last surviving link to the ensemble’s beginnings — ironic, considering that he was not in the original line-up. Initially, Mstislav Rostropovich was to be the Borodin Quartet’s cellist. Two weeks after it was formed, Rostropovich turned up at rehearsals with Berlinsky, an old schoolfriend, in tow. He informed his colleagues that he couldn’t continue because of his other engagements and presented them with their new cellist.

After an exchange of oaths — apparently signed in blood — Berlinsky became a member of what was then called the Moscow Philharmonic Quartet. The line-up included Rostislav Dubinsky on first violin, Nina Barshai on second violin and Rudolf Barshai on viola. They changed their name in the early 1950s when Nina and Rudolf left. This in itself was a politically fraught act. Various communist institutions were in charge of vetting unsuitably bourgeois names.

Tchaikovsky, for example, had been blocked. Glinka, the quartet felt, would be considered too Western by the state. The only other Russian composer to have contributed substantially to the string quartet repertoire was Borodin, so they plumped for him. The authorities approved and in 1955 they became the State Borodin Quartet.

But it was not Borodin primarily with whom they would come to be most closely associated. Dmitri Shostakovich, instead, would become their mainstay; a composer whom they knew and performed with. In fact, many of Shostakovich’s 15 quartets were premiered in private by the Borodins for the composer. Here, Shostakovich could tweak the score before its first public performance. It lent the Borodins an unrivalled authority of interpretation over these 15 key 20th-century works. And critics would often comment on how they felt that they were “eavesdropping on the composer’s own thoughts” when they heard the Borodins play Shostakovich.

Their renditions of Beethoven, Schumann, Mozart, the modern work of their Russian contemporaries — including Alfred Schnittke, Boris Tchaikovsky, Lev Knipper and Moisei Weinberg — and, of course, Borodin were also widely praised. They were often singled out for their sweet sound and spacious accounts that many said were grounded in Berlinsky’s mellifluous tone. He finally left the quartet in March 2007, aged 82.

Valentin Alexandrovich Berlinsky was born in Irkutsk, Siberia, in 1925 to a musical family. His father, who had studied with Leopold Auer, the great Hungarian violinist and dedicatee of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and performed in a local family business, the Berlinsky Quartet, with his three brothers, was Valentin’s first teacher.

From here, Valentin went to the Moscow Conservatoire, studying with Mikhail Terian of the Comitas Quartet — in whose class he met Rostropovich and the future members of the Borodins — and with members of the distinguished Beethoven Quartet. It was the Beethoven Quartet — who gave the public premieres of almost all the Shostakovich quartets — who encouraged the four to come together.

They first met Shostakovich in 1946. Berlinsky remembered the encounter vividly, Shostakovich turning up a minute late, apologising profusely and then playing through his first quartet on the piano while standing. Another time, after they performed his eighth quartet for him, Shostakovich simply buried his head in his hands and wept.

It became a tradition for them to contact Shostakovich each time he completed a new quartet. They would play it through for him then discuss tempi and other interpretative details. Berlinsky remembered one time that the composer queried their speeds. “We said that we were only following his own metronome marks,” recalled Berlinsky. “Shostakovich’s reply was, ‘My metronome at home is broken’.”

In these workshops he could be stubborn or amenable depending on his mood. When the viola player Rudolf Barshai came in late once, missing an entry for his part in the Piano Quintet, Shostakovich changed the score to accommodate the accident. “He didn’t like to argue,” said Berlinsky, “and always insisted on his own way.”

To a large extent the quartet avoided any political trouble during the twists and turns of the Soviet years, though they performed the works of some of the regime’s less-favoured artists. Their premiere recording of Schnittke’s First Quartet in 1967, for example, met with official disapproval. But, by and large, they kept their heads down, especially Berlinsky. His membership of the Communist Party helped to keep things quiet. Even the defection of Dubinsky in 1976 had no serious repercussions apart from musical ones. Berlinsky decided to withdraw the quartet from public for two years to rebuild the Borodin sound.