When Warner Classics & Jazz approached me with the proposal to record some of the symphonies of Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936), I was both flattered at the offer and puzzled at the decision to chronicle a relatively unknown composer. As the Glazunov project evolved over the years, I grew more and more enthusiastic about it, as did the wonderful musicians of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Delving ever deeper into the scores, we discovered a wealth of wonderful late-Romantic music that had been largely neglected.
Was Glazunov a truly major composer? Only time can decide his eventual fate. After all, Bach was mostly forgotten until Mendelssohn championed his music, and Mahler was widely performed but did not become standard repertoire until Leonard Bernstein found his music to be an expression of his own innermost feelings and advocated it with revealing performances.
Glazunov’s music doesn’t carry its heart on its sleeve like Mahler’s and it doesn’t explode hysterically like Tchaikovsky’s. Like a Russian Brahms, his music has deep emotions that are contained and controlled, sophisticated and subtle. His perfect compositional technique is obvious in every bar of music, as is the brilliant orchestration, done in typical late nineteenth-century style.
Glazunov’s inventive and constant harmonic shifts, abrupt changes of tempo and short contrapuntal canons established his personal style of writing in his earliest works and remained with him throughout his life. The youthful First Symphony already shows most of the characteristics that appear in his later work: it’s unmistakably Glazunov. Pairing it with the truncated Ninth Symphony reveals the steadiness of his musical thinking. We are accustomed to thinking of “great” composers as those who lead us along new paths and take chances and experiment. But music history is also filled with composers who weren’t preoccupied by moving forward, but wrote beautiful, meaningful and communicative music. A quick glance at any Glazunov score reveals a mastery of form and harmonic progression, an absolutely professional mind at work.
I found early on in this recording series that I could communicate through this music; I found a soul mate in its inner logic and sensibility. I could not bear to listen to other recordings, because I sensed that the scores cried out for a freedom of expression that others would miss.
At the same time that Glazunov was penning his symphonies, Mahler was writing passionate, personal music. Being an active conductor, he wrote constant performance directions into his scores, obsessively indicating after every few bars that the music was to be played a little faster here, much faster there, to slow down for a few notes “but only a little,” and on and on. Glazunov gave no such indications, so most of the time his music is played almost metronomically, losing the life between the notes. For me, it’s not a question of taking liberties, it’s just a matter of discovering the music’s meaning and its human message. The page of printed notes is but a pale representation of the actual sounds. It’s up to each individual performer to imagine him or herself in the composer’s mind, and thus try both to re-create the desired feelings and to communicate the music to the listener. This process is different for every composer; Glazunov’s music cries out for it.
The Violin Concerto joined the standard repertoire early on, and some of the ballets remain in the dance repertoire, but the large body of Glazunov’s music has made only cameo appearances in concerts over the past seventy years. During the composer’s lifetime and for a few decades after, his music was a more regular element in concerts around the world. Most of the great Russian soloists of the twentieth century performed Glazunov’s Cello Concerto and piano concertos on a regular basis and, judging from reviews of the time, with enormous success.
I am frequently asked if I can understand why Glazunov stopped composing — except for occasional efforts — two-thirds into his life. Some have suggested that becoming head of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and teaching large composition classes robbed him of the time to compose, but this would not explain the musical silence of his many years in Paris after leaving the Soviet Union. My own hypothesis is that Glazunov found himself in a similar predicament to his friend Rachmaninoff (who made two-piano reductions of Glazunov‘s symphonies) and Sibelius, both of whom stopped composing long before the end of their lives. Concert music changed so drastically from the early days of the twentieth century that these and other composers still immersed in the late-Romantic tradition found themselves out of place. After long lapses of time, most of them returned hesitantly to composing — as Rachmaninoff did in his final decade — but remained true to themselves rather than being carried away by fashion.
It had happened before. Bach was considered hopelessly old-fashioned by his own sons. He was still writing Baroque music in the beginning of the totally different Classical era. Eventually, as time has proven over and over, it didn’t matter. Today, we perform Rachmaninoff and Sibelius alongside Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and the date when the works were written is irrelevant to their value. And there are quite a few neglected composers, such as Glazunov, being given a new chance all the time, going back to the early Baroque era. We always rediscover them with wonder.
