Search - Duane Hulbert :: Glazunov: Complete Piano Music, Vol.1

This album, a 2002 Grammy nominee for Best Solo Instrumental Recording, is a work of love by pianist Duane Hulbert. The music of Alexander Glazunov, a contemporary of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin is rarely performed today. Hulbert has resurrected it and restored it to prominence with this first work in a series of Glazunov's complete piano music. In style, Glazunov's own music belongs to the world of late Romanticism. It is closer in spirit to the aristocratic elegance of Tchaikovsky than the more gritty "realism" of Mussorgsky or the self-conscious ethnographic aesthetic of the other members of the "Mighty Handful" (Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Cui and Borodin). Glazunov wrote much less music for the piano than Rachmaninoff, Scriabin or Prokofiev. His output includes two rarely heard piano sonatas and one set of theme and variations. An active pianist since childhood, Glazunov loved to play Bach, Liszt and Chopin. Chopin's influence can be strongly felt in all of his music for the instrument, especially in his mazurkas, nocturnes and waltzes, as well as the strikingly Chopinesque 'Two Impromptus, Op. 54'. Russian composer and critic Boris Asafiev wrote this description of Glazunov's own performing style at the keyboard: "Glazunov's tone was rich, soft and warm, his fingers 'dug into' the keys, so the resonance could be at the same time massive and rumbling and tenderly song-like and soaringly romantic. At the same time, you could feel and intimate Russian simplicity and spaciousness, a freshness of sentiment and a shy lyricism." Glazunov's friends and colleagues greeted his First Piano Sonata with enormous enthusiasm. Rimsky-Korsakov even admitted to feeling pangs of jealousy after hearing Glazunov play it for an invited audience at his house on Kazanskaya Street. "I must tell you that I left your house with such strong impressions from your Sonata that I couldn't set to work on my own music for several days. This is a superb work both in content and in the virtuoso-like execution of form and technique. You cannot imagine what kind of envy and sadness comes over me when I realize that I am incapable of producing anything similar, and even if I had once been capable, I repressed the impulse, and now it is too late."