Progetto Martha Argerich

italiano

Works

Sergej Taneev

Prelude and Fugue for Piano Op. 29

 

The Russian composer and pianist Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev (1856-1915) was a pupil of Nicolai Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky and studied in Paris, where he met Gounod and Saint-Saëns. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory beginning in 1878 and became its director in 1885. An exponent of the so-called “Moscow School” – as opposed to the more emphatically nationalistic “St. Petersburg School” of Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov – he favoured a type of music that was solidly placed within the late-Romantic European tradition. He was a highly cultivated man of broad interests: in addition to music, he devoted himself to mathematics, the natural sciences and sociology. He was also an excellent pianist and often performed together with Leopold Auer, founder of the Russian school of violin-playing. As an outstanding contrapuntist, Taneyev frequently reelaborated, polyphonically, motives drawn from Russian folksongs. The Prelude and Fugue on today’s programme are a fine example of his interest in the most erudite, complex aspects of musical creativity, with Bach as his great, ideal model.

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Andante - Allegro vivace e con fuoco

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