The experience of the Borodin Trio enlightened the audience in Eisenhower Auditorium Friday night.

Their sensitivity to their Russian music, trios by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich, was gorgeous.

But their sentimentality for Russian nationalist music was surprising in light of the pain they suffered there.

"We were completely deprived of our Jewish culture," cellist Yuli Turovsky said, relating the harsh treatment of the Jewish people by the police and how many Jews tried to hide their ethnicity.

Despite the anti-Semitism the Jewish performers experienced in their country, they formed the trio after emigrating to the United States and Canada in 1976.

"Russian music and the Soviet regime are completely separate," pianist Luba Edlina said. Their strong feelings for the government did not color their feeling for the music.

"No one forced us to play. We play because we love it," Turovsky said.

They don't miss the Russia they abandoned. They left all the problems and discrimination behind, but "Russian spirit and culture and language and literature -- we brought it with us inside," Turovsky said.

The political message Shostakovich included in his piece accounts for this.

Rostislav Dubinsky, the violinist, recalled the time he first performed it with Shostakovich on the piano.

"There was no applause. The people were stunned. For the first time, someone had spoken the truth," he said. Shostakovich incorporated the pain of society in his music. He did not follow the forced trend of the past --accommodating the government to survive, he added.

"The trio has a very strong political message," Dubinsky said. The music's call for a mute on the loudest possible dynamic marking, triple forte, could be seen as the complete failure of freedom, he said.

The members of the trio lived at this time in Russia, under Soviet control, where they felt the expression was suppressed as deeply as the racism against Jewish citizens.

But even though "it's a completely different country," Dubinsky said, "it's a mess."

The present state of government does not hide or fix the pain of the past.

"For us, Stalin is not forgotten and never will be," Turovsky said.