Coming in from the cold

"He is the greatest master of counterpoint in Russia; I am not even sure there is his equal in the West." Thus Tchaikovsky on Sergei Taneyev, a figure of towering musical importance, composer of four powerful symphonies, a generous body of chamber music, two passionate religious cantatas and a magnificent operatic trilogy. He was a pivotal figure in Russian music at the turn of the 19th century – a phenomenal pianist, giving the first Moscow performance of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, and an important teacher, counting Rachmaninov, Medtner and Scriabin among his students. He was a folksong collector, student of acoustics and the natural sciences, expert chess player, self-taught Esperanto enthusiast – a man of all-consuming intellectual curiosity. And yet he is barely known outside his native land. Three concerts at the Wigmore Hall next week – also being broadcast on Radio 3 – will help prise the lid off this treasure chest and, with luck, may herald the beginnings of a wider hearing for his music.

Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev (pronounced "Tan-yay-yeff") was born in 1856 near Moscow, into a cultured family (his uncle Alexander was a composer, too). He was playing the piano at five and entered the Moscow Conservatoire at nine. Thus he was in at the start of the Russian musical establishment – Nikolai Rubinstein had founded the Conservatoire only three years earlier.

Before that, "classical" music in Russia had been split into two camps. The Imperial court favoured Western models – operas, chamber music, piano recitals – often produced by specially imported European composers. Then there was the music of the Orthodox church, which had hardly changed in centuries. It was not until Mikhail Glinka (1804-57), "the father of Russian music", that orchestral music and opera tried to sound specifically Russian.

Glinka's example focussed the minds of those composers who felt the lack of a "national music". But these pioneers, too, soon split into two factions. Rubinstein's Moscow Conservatoire (whose first graduate was Tchaikovsky) was mirrored by another set up by his brother Anton in St Petersburg, both taking Western establishments as their models. Another group, "the Mighty Handful" or "The Five", took a more aggressively nationalist stance, and rather looked down at the solid training provided by the two conservatoires. This was the bifurcated world in which Taneyev grew up, and to some extent it predetermined the path his life would take.

In 1875 he made his concert debut as a pianist, starting with Brahms's epic First Concerto, following it later in the year with the Moscow premiere of the Tchaikovsky First Concerto – pleasing the composer, by then his teacher, who then became a life-long friend. The next year he took himself off to Paris, where he both encountered the newest trends in Western music and began to explore the output of Renaissance composers, with profound implications for his own music. Back in Moscow, in 1879 he inaugurated perhaps the most important teaching career in Russian music. First, he replaced Tchaikovsky as teacher of harmony and orchestration at the conservatoire; then, on the death of Rubinstein in 1881, he took over the piano class; the composition class followed in 1883, and two years after that, he became director.

He resigned the directorship in 1889, although he continued to teach counterpoint until 1905, when the autocractic response of the then director to the failed revolution of that year led him to resign in sympathy with his radical students. In the last decade of his life, he took to the concert platform again, writing treatises in his house in the Moscow suburbs, where he lived alone under the watchful eye of his faithful childhood nurse (he never married, though Tolstoy's wife had the hots for him). His death has the ring of a Russian novel: attending the funeral of his former student Alexander Scriabin, he caught a chill that turned into pneumonia, and he died from a heart attack on 19 June 1915.

For all Taneyev's historical importance, it's for his music that he is – or ought to be – celebrated today. His deep study of the Western musical canon gave him a command of contrapuntal argument and of sonata-form structures that was hardly inferior to Beethoven's or Brahms's. Indeed, he was often referred to as "the Russian Brahms", although neither he nor Tchaikovsky liked Brahms's music ("What a giftless bastard", Tchaikovsky once said). His architecture is frequently on the grand scale, but it is tempered by a Schubertian melodic spontaneity and a smouldering, Slavic sense of malevolent fate – often teased by an offbeat sense of fun. He is thus a composer who gladdens heart and head in equal measure.

The Wigmore concerts – probably the first extended attention Taneyev has had in Britain – feature three of his finest chamber works: the 1901 String Quintet on 16 January; the E flat String Trio (1910–11) on the 19th; and the Piano Quintet (1911) on the 23rd. This mini-festival is the brainchild of the cellist Steven Isserlis, who has called upon some of the best musicians in the world to come and play, among them the violinists Ivry Gitlis and Pekka Kuusisto in the String Quintet, with the Russian conductor-pianist Mikhail Pletyev at the keyboard for the Piano Quintet.

Taneyev has been a feature of Isserlis's musical environment for as long as he can remember, not least because his grandfather, the Russian-born composer-pianist Julian Isserlis, was a Taneyev student. Is it lingering family loyalty that accounts for these concerts? Apparently not – Isserlis's motivation is refreshingly simple: "Because I love him! Because I love his music and I think it's fascinating. And it's not known like it should be. I played in the Piano Quintet years ago in Canada and thought it was wonderful. And then I was asked to play in the String Quintet a few years back in Sweden, and it was such difficult stuff that I wanted to do it again, so I took it down to Prussia Cove" – the International Musicians' Seminar in Cornwall, of which Isserlis is artistic director – "and we all fell in love with it, including Pekka [Kuusisto], who is leading it at the Wigmore, and we wanted to do some more."

The sheer complexity of Taneyev's contrapuntal textures must make his music particularly tricky to co-ordinate. "Very difficult! It's very complicated music. I'm sure that's why it's not done as much as that of his contemporaries and students. But it's worth the effort."

The three evenings have been devised to show Taneyev in the light of the world around him. "The first concert is him and Tchaikovsky, his teacher and friend; the second is Taneyev and his students; and the third is Taneyev and colleagues. There's masses more we could have done, because everybody loved him, including The Five, the Rubinstein brothers and Tchaikovksy – he got on well with everybody." Indeed, it's extraordinary – given Taneyev's central position in Russian musical life – how he has managed to sink into such obscurity. "I know – but there are musicians, like Pletnev, who do stand up for it. He has recorded one of the cantatas, for instance. Once you get into this music, you don't want to get out of it."

Paradoxically, the "Europeanness" of Taneyev's musical language – the contrapuntal style and sonata structures – may have helped sideline him, because he doesn't fit our preconceived ideas of what a Russian composer should sound like. But Isserlis warns against pursuing that argument too far: "His temperament is still deeply Slavic: the climaxes are way over the top. And the humour is mad. It's crazy humour – that's one of his great qualities, along with this surging passion."

Taneyev Festival, Wigmore Hall, London W1 (020-7935 2141; www.wigmore-hall.org.uk) 16, 19 and 23 Jan