Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's.

Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early Soviet modernism. As a teacher and critic, Myaskovsky supported his more forward-thinking students and colleagues, while typically preferring to express himself via more traditional means. To my taste, he began to hit his stride from Quartet No. 5 (with its exquisitely restless 'whispering' scherzo) onward. Quartet No. 7 is informed by the folk music of the northern Caucasus, to where he and other Moscow musicians had been evacuated in late '41, and is probably my personal favourite of the thirteen.

Quartets Nos. 8 and 9 are more obviously touched by the "Great Patriotic War"; with the former's elegaic elements, and the latter something of a more formally ambitious public statement (but not, I think, one of his more successful efforts). Quartet No. 13 was Myaskovsky's final composition, composed at a time when his work had been arbitrarily and absurdly denounced as anti-Soviet and "formalist". It's a widely-praised piece, but one I don't feel I have properly grasped yet. Myaskovsky is - rightly - best-known as a prolific symphonist (he wrote no fewer than 27 of the things), but these quartets are also a fascinating body of work that's well-worth getting to know.

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