None of the really big guns of 19th-century Russian music was included in the last concert in Steven Isserlis's Taneyev festival, but the programme was all the more illuminating for that. Born in 1856, Taneyev fell between two famous Russian generations - younger than Tchaikovsky and Rimsky- Korsakov, 15 years older than Rachmaninov and Scriabin - and his music suggests that stylistic transition; it is stuffed with bold, full-blooded romantic gestures, yet always formally deft and complex and sometimes charged with Scriabin-like, expressive chromaticism.

Taneyev's Piano Quintet No 2 in G minor ended this concert. It was preceded by works from two of his contemporaries - the A major String Quintet by Glazunov, pleasantly melodic, well-made and harmlessly bland, and Arensky's Second String Quartet, a sombre, Russian chant-inflected memorial to Tchaikovsky that substitutes another cello for the usual second violin. The quintet, though, dwarfed them both. It is a massive, 50-minute work, half of which is the brooding first movement with its intricate thematic interlacing; there is a lightning-fast scherzo, an elaborate passacaglia-based slow movement and a finale that ends with thunderous piano writing. A powerful, impressive piece, it really deserves to be heard more often.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the quintet is so rarely heard is the challenge of the piano part. A plus of Isserlis's series is the calibre of the performers he is able to call upon, and the pianist in the Taneyev Quintet here was no less than Mikhail Pletnev. It is the kind of music in which Pletnev excels, offering the opportunity to turn a phrase with effortless elegance, to throw off passage-work with dazzling evenness of touch, and unleash torrents of virtuosity when required. His partners were equally distinguished - violinists Vadim Repin and Paavo Kuusisto, viola player Lawrence Power, and Isserlis himself as cellist - and the best possible advocates for such an intriguing work.