Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov

The Wartime Music CD series of the Northern Flowers label includes symphonic opuses of several Russian composers created in the years of terrible ordeals undergone by our nation in the Great Patriotic War. The main goals of the unique project are to preserve the creative heritage of outstanding figures of Russian culture, and to restore historic justice inrespect of undeservedly forgotten compositions and authors.

The Op. 55 Quartet, No. 7, was written in 1941 in the Caucasus where he had been sent and where he made a thorough study of local folk music (indeed incorporating a local Kabarda folk song into the slow movement). Lyrical with a few pleasing harmonic quirks it has an opening movement that perhaps over quotes, to its ultimate structural damage, an opening theme incapable of sustaining fully subsequent developmental potential. The second movement is an engagingly swinging affair; I can certainly imagine ……

Jonathan Woolf @ Musicweb-international.com

The fourth volume in Northern Flowers' reissues of the Taneyev Quartet's recordings of the string quartets by Russian composer Nikolay Myaskovsky joins together his Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh works in the genre. All three come from the later years of the Great Patriotic War, but only the Ninth in D minor was entirely conceived and executed then. The Tenth in F major and the Eleventh in E flat major were conceived much earlier: the Tenth is a rewritten version of an unpublished youthful quartet, while much of the Eleventh is purloined from songs and short piano pieces written in the '30s. This means that only the restless and impassioned Ninth Quartet is recognizable as a work by Myaskovsky, while the Tenth and Eleventh seem……

James Leonard @ AllMusic.com

What Svetlanov is to the Miaskovsky Symphonies the Taneyev is to the Quartets. Like that eminent conductor the St Petersburg quartet remains the only one to have enshrined the canon to disc. Admirers of the composer will perhaps remember the pleasantly colourful LP sleeves and will doubtless welcome the appearance of the set on Northern Flowers. Don’t overlook the booklet artwork. This one has a bucolic Beryl Cook-meets-Socialist Paradise feel. Plenty of big pink buttocks and healthy agricultural toil. Not sure what Nicolai Yakovlevich would have made of that.  The Twelfth Quartet was composed in 1947 and dedicated to his pupil Kabalevsky……

Jonathan Woolf @MusicWeb-International.com