Carpe Diem String Quartet - Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev: Complete String Quartets Vol. 1 (2007)

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Carpe Diem String Quartet - Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev: Complete String Quartets Vol. 1 (2007)

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Chamber musicians favour Taneyev’s gusty and exhausting Piano Quintet, but the six string quartets offer a more complex balance between darkness and light, the contrapuntal busyness at which Taneyev excelled and wide open spaces just when we need them. It was a great disappointment when the Krasni Quartet got no further than the first volume of their Olympia cycle (reviewed in June 2002), so we can only wish the Carpe Diem four better luck. They offer less subtle angles than the Krasnis on the more introspective passages of the five-movement First Quartet, but celebrate more sturdily Taneyev’s robust melodic impetus (viola-player Korine Fujikawa is striking in the big second subject of the first movement). Taneyev’s neo-classical finale, anticipating Richard Strauss’s Indian summer by over half a century, is a real delight, superb encore material; and there’s more of the same among the ‘Theme and Variations’ of the Third Quartet – though here Taneyev often seems to be striving for full orchestral effects, which again the Carpe Diems seem to relish. There’s far more inspired invention in both quartets than in most of Taneyev’s larger-scale works, and once again it gives the lie to his stereotyped image as a dry master of counterpoint – an art of which 19th-century Russian composers were so suspicious. ‘Roll on volumes two and three’, I wrote of the Olympia cycle; let’s hope that holds good for Naxos.

Review by David Nice, BBC Music Magazine

Sergey Taneyev, a superbly educated, tremendously talented, and incredibly hard-working Russian Silver Age composer, was so acutely self-critical that he allowed very little of his music to be published or performed in his lifetime. Unfortunately, this has made a total hash of his oeuvre. Did Taneyev write one symphony or four? Six string quartets or nine? And if he did write four symphonies and nine quartets but allowed only one symphony and six quartets to be published and performed, should contemporary performers play them all or just those the composer found worthy? Russia's Taneyev Quartet recorded all nine quartets in the only previous series of the works previously issued, and the Carpe Diem Quartet is clearly headed in the same direction with this 2007 release of the First and Third quartets; it is announced as the first in a series of all nine. Compared with the Taneyev, the Carpe Diem is lighter, cleaner, more lyrical, and more rhythmic, an approach that works wonderfully well in the fast, odd-numbered movements of the First Quartet and both movements of the Third Quartet. It works less well in the slow, even-numbered movements of the First Quartet where the Russian group's intensity arguably gets them deeper under the emotional skin of the music. For neophytes, both approaches have their merits, but the Americans' warmer digital sound may tip the balance in their favor. For those who already know the earlier recordings, the chance to hear another series of performances of Taneyev's quartets will eagerly be embraced.

Review by James Leonard, Allmusic.com

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Carpe Diem String Quartet - Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev: Complete String Quartets Vol. 1 (2007)

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Carpe Diem String Quartet - Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev: Complete String Quartets Vol. 1 (2007)

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Carpe Diem String Quartet - Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev: Complete String Quartets Vol. 1 (2007)

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