The fourth volume in Northern Flowers' reissues of the
Taneyev Quartet's recordings of the string quartets by Russian composer Nikolay Myaskovsky joins together his Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh works in the genre. All three come from the later years of the Great Patriotic War, but only the Ninth in D minor was entirely conceived and executed then. The Tenth in F major and the Eleventh in E flat major were conceived much earlier: the Tenth is a rewritten version of an unpublished youthful quartet, while much of the Eleventh is purloined from songs and short piano pieces written in the '30s. This means that only the restless and impassioned Ninth Quartet is recognizable as a work by Myaskovsky, while the Tenth and Eleventh seem too cheerful and ingratiating to be by the usually gloomy composer. As always in this series, the
Taneyev Quartet gives its all to the music. Though its all does not always include a tight ensemble or a unified approach to intonation, it does include an ardent sense of phrasing and a sympathetic feeling for Myaskovsky's music, qualities that count for a lot in these otherwise unrecorded works. Recorded in the early '80s, the stereo sound here is plain, direct, and unadorned.