Taneyev String quartet no 5

 Day 115

Taneyev String quartet no 5 op 13

Carpe Diem String Quartet

Taneyev is another of those composers from the generation between Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky’s. He was a close associate of Tchaikovsky (he played the solo part in the first performance of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto in Moscow) but was also a merciless critic and had no hesitation in pointing out what he considered to be defects in Tchaikovsky’s music. He was a noted teacher, with Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Glière among his pupils. He also published an exhaustive 2-volume study of renaissance and baroque counterpoint.  I knew the name but I don’t recall consciously listening to any of his music before.

He completed 9 string quartets and left two more unfinished. I chose this one at random. It is a curious work. It has much of the spirit of Haydn - indeed if you ignore the harmony much of it looks like Haydn on the page - the second subject of the first movement and the very end are two good examples of this. But harmonically I found it quite hard to follow. Some of it was straightforwardly tonal in a way that would have been familiar to Tchaikovsky or Brahms but in other places the harmony veered off in strange directions. It was never overtly dissonant let alone atonal, but it did seem directionless and ultimately quite disconcerting - the slow movement especially seemed to wander along getting nowhere. 

The scherzo worked best I think, Here the feeling of Haydn was at its strongest - indeed if the first 20 or so bars have been dropped into a late Haydn quartet I don’t think anybody would have noticed. And later in the movement we got some hints of Taneyev’s skill at counterpoint.  

So overall not a particularly satisfying experience - there was clearly a strong musical mind at work here but somehow it didn’t all jell together.  Perhaps my random choice was unfortunate but it didn’t make me want to listen to more Taneyev straight away.