CD: Taneyev: Piano Trio Op 22; Piano Quartet Op 20

When Mikhail Pletnev brought his Russian National Orchestra to the Barbican in London this year he came on a crusade. Both concerts featured large-scale pieces by Sergey Taneyev, better known as the teacher of Rachmaninov and Scriabin (and for a short time Prokofiev) than for his own music. Pletnev clearly believes that Taneyev (1856-1915) has been unjustly neglected; now in his other role as a pianist, Pletnev is trying to rehabilitate Taneyev's chamber music, collaborating with a starry collection of instrumentalists - violinists Vadim Repin and Ilya Gringolts, viola-player Nabuko Imai and cellist Lynn Harrell - on recordings of the G minor Piano Quintet (1911) and the D major Piano Trio (1908). Their playing is electrifying, inspired by the nervous energy that is such a feature of Pletnev's pianism at its best, but the music fails to come alive.

There is no doubt Taneyev was a very fine musician - Tchaikovsky described him as "the greatest master of counterpoint in Russia". But he stood apart from the Russian nationalist tradition, never joining in the admiration that most of his generation had for Mussorgsky and other mem-bers of the Mighty Handful (Borodin, Cui, Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov), preferring to ally himself with Tchaikovsky and his followers. Increasingly, too, Taneyev looked for inspiration elsewhere; Mozart was the model he aspired to above all others, while an early fascination with Bach extended farther back to renaissance masters such as Lassus and Ockeghem.

None of those interests, though, is detectable in Taneyev's music, which seems to be couched in a kind of late-romantic lingua franca that lacks any identity of its own. The problem seems to be that he could not come up with a memorable melody, and this is the kind of music that depends upon some kind of vivid idea to have any effect. Pletnev and his colleagues work hard in both pieces; there is some delicious give-and-take between them, but they are working with material that is fundamentally unrewarding.

The Deutsche Grammophon disc has appeared at the same time as Dutton's release, with performances of the Piano Trio and the E major Piano Quartet from the Barbican Piano Trio. They are admirable, musical and thoughtful, but though lacking the vital spark that Pletnev in particular brings to the trio, it all sounds earnest and worthy, and the three-movement Piano Quartet from 1906, with its central slow movement built around an overripe, almost kitschy theme, is really more of the same. The Taneyev cause, I fear, is lost.