Sergey Taneyev, perhaps best remembered as nineteenth century Russia's most renowned music theorist, was in his time also known as a composer -- an austere, severe, and enormously self-critical composer. For example, he wrote four symphonies, but allowed only the fourth and last to be performed and published. In these capable and committed performances of the First and Third with Valeri Polyansky leading the Russian State Symphony Orchestra, one can readily understand why Taneyev kept the works in his drawer. The First Symphony in E minor was written in the early 1870s when Taneyev was still a student in the Moscow Conservatory. It's clearly a novice effort: the forms are straightforward, the phrasing is four-square, the scoring is by the numbers, and the sense of individuality is nonexistent. His Third Symphony in D minor followed 10 years later when Taneyev was a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. It's surely a more confident effort: the themes are more arresting, the forms are more interesting, the developments are more convincing, and the sense of individuality is more pronounced. Still, even in Polyansky and the Russian State's idiomatic performances, it's hard to place the identity -- or even the nationality -- of the composer. Without Arensky's sweetness, Glazunov's tunefulness, or Liapunov's sternness, Taneyev sounds at best like a later, lesser Rubinstein -- and having been recorded in dim, gray digital sound in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory by conductor / producer Valeri Polyansky doesn't help.