Bard Music Festival Players & Todd Crow - Taneyev: String Quintet in G Major, Op. 14, Piano Music (1999)

Sergei Ivanovich Tanayev (1856-1915) was a student of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rubenstein at the Moscow Conservatory, where he went on to become first a teacher and later the director. He introduced many masterpieces by other Russian composers to the music world. His own compositions, however, are more clearly a product of the Austrian-German romantic tradition. In the genre of chamber music, Taneyev seems to have employed his most personal style: intimate, private, and serious. The works on this disc reveal his skill at building large sonata structures, as well as a keen instinct for aural colors and sonorities.

The String Quintet in G major was written in 1901 and is dedicated to Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The piano music generally falls into the category of short character pieces, mostly from the composer’s early years.

Since its founding in 1990, the Bard Music Festival Rediscoveries Series has devoted its annual programs to unusual in-depth explorations of major composers. For two August weekends at the Bard College campus at Annandale-on-Hudson, and for one fall weekend at New York’s Lincoln Center, the Bard Music Festival offers concerts, panel discussions, and other special programs. The Wall Street Journal places the Bard Music Festival “in the top drawer of U.S. summer musical events.” Festival volumes are published each summer by Princeton University Press. The composers highlighted in the festival’s first decade include Brahms, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Schumann, Bartok, Ives, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg and Taneyev.