Over a lifetime that witnessed unprecedented musical and social upheaval in his homeland of Russia, this composer remained resolutely his own man.

Lived 1865-1936
Mostly in St. Petersburg, Paris
Best known for The Seasons, Symphonies, Violin Concerto
Similar to Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Borodin


Between the realism of Mussorgsky, who sought melody in the patterns of natural human speech, and the highly-strung autobiography of Tchaikovsky’s more personal works, Alexander Glazunov’s sane, well-made symphonies and gentle building on tradition seem remarkably tame to those looking for authentic Russian wildness.

One reason for the lower emotional temperatures is that, although he had composed three symphonies before Tchaikovsky took his final bow with the Pathétique, Glazunov was from a different generation. Many of his mentors came to maturity in the 1860s, the decade in which the emancipation of the serfs brought a new strain of thought devoted to all things genuinely Russian; it was the era of Chernyshevsky’s polemical novel What is to be done? and artist Ilya Repin’s masterly pictorial commentaries on social ills. By the 1880s, when precocious ‘Sasha’ Glazunov came into his own, painters had turned to abstraction and idealism had become the order of the day. If ever there was music...