[concert] Taneyev: Piano Quartet in E major Op 20. (Kettle's Yard)

[tamaranth]

I don't tend to pick concerts of music I don't know, but the Kettle's Yard concerts are free and a quick Wikipedia / YouTube* search for Taneyev intrigued me enough to tempt me along.

Sergei Taneyev (1856 - 1915) is like a missing link in Russian music: he was taught by Tchaikovsky and taught Rachmaninoff. His music is very popular in Russia, hardly known elsewhere. He is sometimes compared to Brahms.

This concert by the Chatto Quartet was fairly empty due to Weather, but that was good as musique_monkey and I had a choice of seats: ended up right at the front, about 5ft from the piano, able to peer over the cellist's shoulder at her music. (My notebook is filled with musings about the geometry of bows, the slap of the pianist's hand as she turns the page mid-cadenza, and speculations on some art I haven't been able to stare at before.)

The Piano Quartet was hard work for me, hard to see how the pieces fitted together. (I wonder if this is Just Me right now: I had the same problem with the last unfamiliar Tchaikovsky piece I saw performed live). But the disparate pieces were often lovely. There were moments of sombre romanticism, some Bach-like fugue, a vigorous and oddly dissonant first movement, a second movement with the traditional third movement nested within it ("it is in only three movements, but the second movement is a ternary form slow movement that contains in the middle a rhythmic scherzo; thus the quartet fulfils the demands of the classical four-movement form"), and a melody that was, apparently, nicked by Rodgers and Hart for 'Blue Moon'.

Chatto Quartet very worthwhile: Taneyev intriguing but difficult: long walk in snow (plus swim) pleasantly exhausting!

*YouTube is an excellent resource for classical music, even the really obscure stuff: who'd've thought? But there are plenty of live performances on there.

Comments

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Taneiev can be quite hard work, I agree, but I have tended to like all of the chamber music I have got to know eventually. I'm very fond of the suite for violin and orchestra, and of his operatic adaptation of all three parts of the Oresteia. He orchestrated the version of the Love Music from the Romeo and Juliet overture that Tchaikovsky redid as a love duet for an opera he never wrote.

Oddly, the symphonies are the really routine silver age Russian bit of him that one can almost pass on.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

oooh, I may have to look out for the Oresteia ... (assuming it is less, er, highly strung than R Strauss Electra.)

[rozk.livejournal.com]

There is an Olympia recording, not all that good but the only one there is - the Ashkenazy recording of the Violin Suite uses an orchestral prelude from it as filler. Not as highly strung as Elektra, but then what is? On the other hand, it gets through all three plays in two discs. Enescu's Oedipus opera has a really good scene with the Sphinx come to that...

If you can't find Oresteia, maybe we can do something social with it, because I bought it during one of the massive Olympia sales.

[lj_stowaway]

Sightly OT, have you heard of the Newbury Spring Festival? It's a bit of a hike from where you are now, but I thought I'd mention it. Don't know much about it - I do some work for a foundation that is one of the sponsors - but thought I'd pass it along FWIW.