As I noted last December, the difference between a competent and an outstanding performance of Schnittke's music is crucial. The Borodin Quartet and Ludmilla Berlinsky on Virgin Classics make his Piano Quintet sound like something close to a masterpiece; listening to the Mondriaan and Fred Oldenburg I felt right back at square one.
It's not as if the Dutchmen are in any way unsympathetic or less than properly prepared, though the lifeless acoustic certainly does not help matters. It's more that they lack an instinctive grasp of where the music is coming from; and symptoms of that are to be found in the way they address and colour virtually every phrase.
Similarly the Third Quartet (the most frequently performed string quartet composed in the 1980s?) is more than adequately played. But the Borodin and the Britten Quartet (on Collins Classics, coupled with Beethoven Opp. 130/133) make the journey far more compelling, and for the collector who must have every note of Schnittke, the five-minute Kanon in memoriam I. Stravinsky is available in a superior version from the Hagen Quartet on DG (coupled with Ligeti No. 1 and Lutoslawski).'