Joint Improvisations: Taneyev, Arensky, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff

Discography:

Joint Improvisations 4 Improvisations on Themes of Arensky, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff, and Taneyev: IV. Largo - YouTube

Taneyev: Piano Quintet in G Minor Taneyev - Piano Quintet - Pletnev / Repin / Gringolts / Imai / Harrell (Verbier, 2003) - YouTube

Glazunov: Symphony 1 Glazunov “Symphony No 5” Gennadi Rozhdestvensky - YouTube

Rachmaninoff: Symphony 1 Rachmaninoff: Sinfonia No 1 em Ré menor, Op. 13/ Minczuk . Orquestra Sinfônica Brasileira - YouTube

“One  autumn  day  in  1896,  anton arensky invited 

Rachmaninoff  and Glazunov  to  dinner  at  his St. 

Petersburg home  to  celebrate a visit  from Sergey 

Taneyev. A network of personal and professional ties linked these notable musicians. Rachmaninoff, for example, had studied with Arensky and Taneyev; Arensky and Glazunov had in turn  studied  with  Rimsky-Korsakov.  After  dinner  the  four composers played a musicalparlor game. Each of them took a sheet of paper  and  wrote out the initial  phrase  of  a small character piece for piano. When  all  were  ready,  each passed his sheet  to  a colleague who extended the composition, and this round  robin  continued  until the  sheets  returned to  their starting positions.” (Gebrauch-Formulas, Robert Gjerdinger)

Gjerdinger is actually ‘professionalizing’ a post by Amphissa on the Rachmaninoff.org forum.

Taneyev

He joined the Moscow conservatory when only nine years old, studying piano and composition. At 14 he joined Tchaikovsky’s composition class, and struck up a lasting friendship with his tutor. In later years, he would premiere Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto, and was one of the few permitted to give musical criticism to that great composer.

Tchaikovsky once wrote

“I know you are absolutely sincere and I think a great deal of your judgment. But I also fear it” - (From the letters of Tchaikovsky, qtd in Sergei Taneyev - Wikipedia)

But he was a composer in his own right, the author of a monumental treatise on Counterpoint that led to his nickname - the “Russian Brahms.” 

Rimsy-Korsakov described Taneyev’s technique as follows:

“Before setting out for the real expounding of a composition, Taneyev used to precede it with a multitude of sketches and studies: he used to write fugues, canons, and various contrapuntal interlacings on the individual themes, phrases, and motives of the coming composition; and only after gaining thorough experience in its component parts did he take up the general plan of the composition and the carrying out of this plan, knowing by that time, as he did, and perfectly, the nature of the material he had at his disposal and the possibilities of building with that material” (qtd from Sergei Taneyev - Wikipedia)

“The Quintet in particular demonstrates how Taneyev’s twin obsessions, counterpoint and musical form, can meaningfully combine. Its first movement is a clearly articulated sonata structure, the success of each passage closely linked to its formal function: the introduction slow, the exposition declamatory, the development a web of polyphonic intrigue and the recapitulation emboldened through its stern sense of inevitability. Repeated octave Ds in the piano left hand drive home this sense of return, introducing first the recapitulation and then the coda.” (Gavin Dixon, Sergei Taneyev: Tchaikovsky’s Heir or the Russian Bach?)

Taneyev: Piano Quintet in G Minor Taneyev - Piano Quintet - Pletnev / Repin / Gringolts / Imai / Harrell (Verbier, 2003) - YouTube

Arensky

Another precocious Romantic, and teacher of Rachmaninoff. He, however, was often called imitative.

Anton Arensky | Russian composer | Britannica.com

His teacher, Rimsy-Korsakov, wrote the following

“In his youth Arensky did not escape some influence from me; later the influence came from Tchaikovsky. He will quickly be forgotten.” (qtd in. Anton Arensky - Wikipedia)

In the Wikipedia Talk section, under the title “Gambling and Alcohol Abuse,” appears the following

“I’ve added a source here (Rimsky-Korsakov’s memoirs) since that seems to be the only source about this side of Arensky’s life - very little is known about his private life. It’s something that gets perpetuated endlessly and Rimsky as an only source is slightly suspect since he appears to have had some gripes about Arensky.” “ (User:Ilja.nieuwland - Wikipedia)

Arensky: Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky Arensky Variations on a Theme by Tchaikovsky played by EWCO under Rostislav Krimer - YouTube

Glazunov

“Would musical history have turned out differently if Alexander Glazunov hadn’t been smashed out of his wits when he conducted the first performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1 in D minor? The best of Glazunov’s own neatly carpentered symphonies hover on the verge of greatness. Perhaps if he hadn’t been such a toper — swigging from bottles of spirits during lectures at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he was director — they would do more than hover. Unfortunately, his drinking didn’t just screw up his own career.“

The 23-year-old Sergei Rachmaninov had spent two years working on his first symphony, whose climaxes erupt from melodic cells borrowed from Orthodox chant. Not that Glazunov would have noticed. He barely glanced at the score before the premiere. On that fateful evening in 1897 he conducted ‘like a zombie’, according to one account. The orchestra was all over the place. Poor Rachmaninov hid on a spiral staircase while it was going on and then ran into the street to escape the catcalls.

Composer, conductor and drunk Alexander Glazunov. Photo: Getty

Posterity doesn’t lay all the blame at Glazunov’s door. The conventional wisdom is that, even in a fine performance such as Ashkenazy’s with the Concertgebouw, the work is a sprawling mess, exciting in places but basically one of music’s shipwrecks.

Nonsense.” (Damain Thompson, the UK Spectator)

Next Week: Rachmaninoff