TANEYEV: Violin Sonata in A min. Piano Quintet in G min. / Spectrum Concerts Berlin: Boris Brovtsyn, vln I; Mohamed Hiber, vln 2; Gareth Lubbe, vla; Alexey Stadtler, vc; Eldar Nebolsin, pno / Naxos 8.574566
Sergei Taneyev (1856-1915) is described on the back cover of this CD as “a loner whose supreme mastery of European Classical technique placed him outside the more nationalist trends of his day.” Translation: his music sounded even more Western than Tchaikovsky’s, and it stayed within the Romantic framework well into the period in which Debussy, Scriabin, Stravinsky and Schoenberg had completely changed the game. His most acclaimed work is the Piano Quintet in G minor featured on this release, here coupled with his Violin Sonata.
The music is played here by a chamber group that calls itself Spectrum Concerts Berlin. I would suspect that the “spectrum” is the diverse ethnic backgrounds of its component members: three Russians, an Arabian Frenchman who studied in Spain, and a South African violist. That’s what you call ethnically diverse, all right! And look, they all get along!
The real problem with Taneyev’s having dropped off the map of most classical performers is that his music was even more reactionary than any of his contemporaries. The Violin Sonata, for instance, doesn’t sound Brahmsian or Beethoven-ish. It sounds like advanced Mozart, and that’s going back some. It’s very well-constructed and clearly has enough tunefulness to appeal to the average classical listener, meaning those whose ears are too lazy to adapt to more modern sounds, but it doesn’t exhibit much imagination or originality. In short, it makes nice background listening for rich people’s Sunday brunches although it is not an altogether bland piece. It’s just super-conventional for its time and rather backwards-looking.
As the music progressed, what struck me the most was the complexity and independence of the piano part. This is not the kind of sonata in which the piano simply feeds the violin themes to play and then acts as a bustling accompanist, although there are some passages like this. More often than not, the piano is an independent voice in this musical dialogue, playing its own themes which are not taken up by the violin or purposely playing themes that run counter to the violin line. That is its originality and a point of departure from the Mozartian style. In that sense, Taneyev’s music was something like Schumann’s.
Much to my delight, violinist Boris Brovtsyn has that typically bright Russian violin tone but also uses an almost constant vibrato while playing, which is stylistically correct for its time. Sooner or later these HIP fanatic have got to start admitting that there was a time in musical history when straight tone stopped, and I say that it stopped with the arrival of Sarasate, Ysaÿe and Huberman; their recordings prove as much. Back to the music, there are some interesting “drone” effects written into the third-movement Minuet that also appealed to me.
Notwithstanding all this, it is still the Piano Quintet, written around the same time as this Violin Sonata, that grabs and holds one’s attention from first note to last. This is unquestionably Taneyev’s masterpiece; no, more than that, it is his only truly great work (I’ve listened to other Taneyev pieces online, and none of them really come close). Here, his Classical formalism is replaced, or at least amplified, by almost wild inspiration and a headlong rush through its highly inventive and often surprising themes and turns of phrase. After the initial section, Spectrum Concerts gives the music a highly charged reading which suits its mood and form. All five musicians really get into the piece, and I found it interesting that the individual timbres of the string players gave the string quartet a more discrete than blended sound quality. In this work, Taneyev moves subtly but noticeably in and out of neighboring tonalities during the music’s development, which adds further interest to the proceedings. The piano part here is indeed virtuosic, as advertised, but also more integrated into the proceedings, often acting like a cattle prod to urge the strings into more vehement involvement in the ongoing development. In the last section of the first movement, Taneyev suddenly doubles the tempo to create a feverish finale.
The second-movement “Scherzo: Presto” is indeed taken at an almost breathless pace, albeit mostly in mezzo-forte dynamics though with occasional outbursts in the forte. We get a quieter, more relaxed trio section, and this is one spot that struck me as formulaic though effective. The third-movement “Largo” is no relaxed, Romantic idyll, but a strong-themes piece that almost has a march-like feel to it. As it evolves, however, the feeling in this movement alternates between the aggressive and the tragic. After a somewhat hesitating opening , the last movement moves like greased lightning through a number of themes and their variants—at least until the halfway mark, when the music suddenly comes to a dead stop and, when it resumes, does so at half tempo and in the major with some remarkably pretty themes. The key suddenly changes towards the end of this section, followed by an increase in volume and some absolutely ecstatic music. But I kept waiting for the tempo to increase again, since this is a formula used by mane a Romantic composer, yet it never did. It just kept increasing the volume and intensity of this new section until it reached almost a fever pitch before the final chord.
Spectrum Concerts Berlin gives this work its full due and, as I say, the violin sonata really just sounds like a pleasant preamble to the main event. The emotionally charged, powerful and highly inventive quintet would surely upset the Sunday brunch I alluded to earlier. Well worth getting for this splendid realization of the latter piece.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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