By the end of his compositional career, Soviet Russian composer Nikolay Myaskovsky had traded one favorite tempo indication for another. In earlier works, his preferred marking was tenebroso -- that is, dark, murky, and gloomy -- although lugubre and Malinconia also show up with some regularity. By the end of his career, however, tenebroso had virtually disappeared and fantastico had taken its place. Some might attribute this change to the composer's own lightening mood, others to the changes in the USSR after the country's victory in the Great Patriotic War, and others still to the composer's wise renunciation of darkness and gloom for brightness and sparkle in the face of official condemnation after the war.
Whatever the reason, the change was undoubtedly for the better. As this final disc in the
Taneyev Quartet's survey of his complete string quartets shows, Myaskovsky's fantastico music is far more enjoyable than his tenebroso music. Both his Twelfth Quartet in G major from 1947 and his Thirteenth and final quartet in A minor from 1949 contain fantastico Scherzos as their second movements, and both are immediately impressive in their form and entirely memorable in the melodies. Nor are the quartets' remaining movements any less appealing. As performed with a solid technique and deep understanding by the
Taneyev Quartet, the G major and the A minor quartets prove to be among the most attractive of Myaskovsky's works in the genre, with a warm-hearted lyricism that seems more authentic than the composer's earlier gloom and doom. As before in this series, Northern Flowers' remastered stereo sound is lean, clean, and close, but evocative.