In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the soirées du vendredi were the meeting place par excellence for musicians in Saint Petersburg. These evenings were organized by Mitrofan Belyayev, a passionate music lover and amateur violinist. When he started these soirées, he had already initiated various musical plans. He had acted as a patron of the young Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936) since
… 1883 and had founded a music publishing house in Leipzig in 1885. More than two thousand works, many of them of Russian origin, would appear at that firm. This included two albums with quartet music, entitled 'Les Vendredis'. They were pieces performed during, and sometimes even specially written for, the aforementioned series of soirées. The authors' names reveal that Belyayev managed to lure all famous Petersburg musicians to his soirées, but music was also played by people whose backgrounds can hardly be traced today. For example, on this CD a 'Berceuse' by a certain Maximilian d'Osten-Sacken sounds, of whom it is only known that he must have been born in the nineteenth century. Most of the works in the two collections, and thus also on this CD, are of identical quality: short character pieces, in which charm is more important than profundity. Exceptions are a thoroughly elaborated Allegro by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) and a ditto Prelude and fugue by Belyayev's protégé Glazunov. Also notable are a Scherzo by Nikolai Sokolov (1859-1922) that is based on 'thèmes populaires' from the French region of Basse-Bretagne and an emphatically archaic-looking Sarabande by Anatoly Liadov (1855-1914). All in all, the quality of the music is quite variable, but the special background of the repertoire - written when there was hardly any chamber music tradition in Russia - and the excellent playing of the Quatuor Ravel make this an unquestionably interesting CD. (JvG)more
