Beautiful Tone Glazunov and Taneyev String Quintets - enjoyed by STEPHEN FRANCIS VASTA '... the Gringolts ensemble plays expertly, projecting the music's sense of "symphonic" weight and importance while maintaining the vivid interplay among the parts.'

These two sensitively wrought, appealing scores are fine examples of the work of the second-tier Russian Romantics. I'm puzzled, however, by Andrew Huth's suggestion, in the booklet, of Russian folk or liturgical influence: little in these scores sounds overtly Russian to me.

Sergei Taneyev's quintet, the first of his two, has a distinctly Tchaikovskian, cosmopolitan veneer, its rich textures intensified by the layering of contrasting elements. Huth describes the first movement as 'a dense, large-scale sonata movement', but the effect is more fantasia than sonata: it's easy enough to hear where the exposition ends, but it's less clear where the development sidles into the recapitulation...

SERGEI TANEYEV

ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV

BIS RECORDS

STRING MUSIC

CHAMBER MUSIC

STRING QUINTETS

SWITZERLAND