![]() ![]() His Grande valse de concert, Op 41, was completed in 1891 and is in every way a tour de force. Though undoubtedly finished works in their own right, one cannot help thinking that their composition might have served as a preparation for his more famous orchestral Valse de concert, Op 47, and his later ballet waltzes. All of his piano waltzes were written during a particularly prolific period of his life – between 18. Glazunov shows an affinity with waltzes, and delicious concoctions they are. ![]() With his Waltzes on the theme ‘SABELA’, Op 23, Glazunov picks up exactly where he left off in his Suite, this time incorporating the name of the work’s dedicatee, Nadezhda Sabela, a distinguished coloratura soprano of the period (the letters forming the sequence E flat, A, B flat, E natural and ‘La’, or the note A). If a composer plays well or a pianist composes well, he said, there is good reason to suspect that each is passing off someone else’s work as his own. When I seated myself at the piano and apologized for playing badly, he remarked that it should be so. Apropos of something, Liszt said that if a work contains something Russian, it is certain to be good. Various composers came, among them Saint-Saëns. He particularly liked the agitato in the Prelude. Glazunov relates how, on his visit to Weimar in the same year: ‘ … made his pupil Friedheim, a Russian, play my piano suite, but he played the Prelude so badly that Liszt chased him away from the piano and made me continue. This work was already known to Liszt in 1884 – an interesting confirmation of the advantages to be gained by publishing with Belaieff in Leipzig rather than the more isolated Russian-based publishing houses. It contains a wealth of contrapuntal detail and that exuberance which naturally accompanies a young composer exploring a new medium. Using the notes which spell the diminutive of his own name, SASCHA (in German notation these letters stand for E flat, A, E flat, C, B, A), it is great bravura writing, offering no concessions to the performer. Written in 1883, it is a remarkably assured work containing many of the pianistic devices which were to become a feature of his later piano-writing. The Suite on the name ‘SASCHA’, Op 2, is Glazunov’s first published piano composition and is dedicated to his mother, Elena Glazunova. With the death of Tchaikovsky in 1893, and that of Anton Rubinstein in the following year, Glazunov took centre stage and became the leader of the new musical establishment. Three years after Borodin’s death, Glazunov, still only twenty-five years old, took over the post of conductor at the Russian Symphony Concerts from Rimsky-Korsakov who was now turning increasingly to opera. Within this vacuum, Glazunov’s reputation grew. Balakirev, meanwhile, had become increasingly estranged from his colleagues because of his continuing obsession with nationalism and his difficult temperament. César Cui had become distanced from his former friends largely because of his vitriolic, if entertaining, music reviews (his description of Rachmaninov’s first symphony as a ‘programme symphony on the Seven Plagues of Egypt’ is a good example of the sort of remark that lost him the goodwill of his fellow composers). The group had now lost its two most original, if hardly prolific, composers. Their dominance, however, proved to be short-lived for, in 1887, with Mussorgsky already dead, ‘The Mighty Handful’ effectively passed into history with the unexpected death of Borodin. An influential and powerful group, comprising Balakirev together with Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Cui, became known as ‘The Mighty Handful’. Eventually Balakirev’s views came to influence a whole generation of composers in St Petersburg. Rubinstein looked to the west for inspiration Balakirev, on the other hand, looked towards the east and Russia’s own heritage of folk song and ethnic diversity. Though both paid homage to the earlier nationalistic composer Glinka, they differed in their views about the direction which Russian music should take. In 1865, the year of Glazunov’s birth (and also that of the composers Carl Nielsen, Paul Dukas and Jean Sibelius), the Russian musical establishment was dominated by the opposing figures of Balakirev and Anton Rubinstein. ![]()
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