Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev was an important figure in the Russian music scene of the 1800’s. He was Tchaikovskys pupil and the teacher of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. I read somewhere that in Russia today his bust will appear alongside Beethoven, Tchaikovsky etc. And yet … “By the time of his death at the age of 58, Taneyev had left behind a substantial catalog of works, virtually none of which has entered the standard repertory.”
The virtuosic and scintillating Suite de concert, Taneyev’s first work for solo violin and orchestra. This is the final variation and coda.
Taneyev Suite de concert Final variation and coda
As a virtuoso pianist Taneyev could display his own piano works, as Chopin, Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, and Medtner had done and were to do. Somewhat unusually for a pianist-composer of his calibre, however, he wrote very few compositions for the instrument, and he did not perform these at concerts…
Taneyev Repose (Elegy) in E major
From the String Quartet #3 – opus 7 (Theme and Variations) I’ve picked out three of the variations
SQ variation
Taneyev
January 1, 2010 at 10:28 amThe Suite is the hugest and better ever written for violin and orchestra IMO. Is incomprehensible that this magnificent piece had been forgotten and nearly nobody plays it outside Russia. The best recording to me, are any of the two made by the great King David Oistrakh. About the 9 string quartets, they are without doubt the best chamber instrumental corpus by any Russian composer in the 19th.century. There was an excelent recording of the complete set made by the extraordinary Taneyev-Leningrad SQ in the 70s.