For a composer working very much within a tradition, Glazunov has a surprising number of tricks and facets to offer, and it is amazing that the Russian school of orchestral pianism should, for the most part, have steered clear of these. In recent years, Leslie Howard has helped to promote the sonatas’ curious mixture of rodomontade and the nicer, more sincere side of the composer, while Tatyana Franova on Marco Polo has kept the sonatas and the glittering bonnes bouches apart on two separate CDs. The first two volumes in this admirable Coombs/Hyperion venture seem to me the most successful so far in presenting Glazunov’s works for piano in the round; each offers a programme which demands to be heard from start to finish and ought to keep a concert-hall audience more than happy, too (assuming you could fill the hall in the first place). The grand introduction to the precocious 18-year-old’s Suite on the name “Sacha” – his own, of course, and starting daringly with our devilish friend the tritone, S being the German Es for E flat – melts into four enchanting but none the less fiendishly difficult movements of post-Carnaval-esque whimsy: Schumann was still a major influence on the Russians at the time, and Liszt approved young Sacha’s first flourish when Glazunov visited Weimar in 1883. The Lisztian bravura means pages of more facile alternatives in the score, but Coombs rises to the challenge of the original and admirably keeps his head into the bargain.
His finest achievement, however, is in the string of waltzes, cleverly ordered, at the heart of the disc – from simple (Op. 42 No. 3) to dizzyingly involved (the Grande valse de concert) and back again. Dazzling harmonic side-slips and pressing melancholy are handled with a masterly spring and a rubato which is obviously second nature to this pianist. While in the mood I turned to hear four roughly contemporary Valses-caprices on an earlier Hyperion ‘special’ (Kathryn Stott’s complete Faure, 5/95), and relished the comparison; both sequences would work well programmed at opposite ends of a recital. Rubato is the chief pleasure of Coombs’s playing in Sonata No. 1, too, along with a nice terracing of the climaxes. Here it’s back to mainstream romantic sweep, though the theme of the slow movement is admirably simple, embroidered in a way that Grainger would have admired, and the finale is Glazunov at his most robustly ceremonial.
Volume 1, then, already suggests the ideal Glazunov piano collection; but the perspectives broaden in Vol. 2 and if I had to take a single opus away with me from what Coombs has offered us so far, it would be the Three Etudes: a splendid sequence. The Second is a masterpiece, beginning with what sounds like a meditation on Tchaikovsky’s “Happiness was once so near us” – from the final meeting of Onegin and Tatyana – before easing the pain with a central E major consolation of which Rachmaninov would have been very proud, and which he might have touched upon at the end in much the same way. Several character-pieces, including a “Gavotte” (Trois morceaux), of which (predictably enough, perhaps) Prokofiev once made a piano roll, are more like what one might have predicted of Glazunov the miniaturist, and so are the three brief early works which follow; but the dark, almost morbid Two Prelude-improvisations of 1918 reveal another facet – a romanticism prompted to move unselfconsciously with the times. It’s only at the last minute that what sounds like a real Russian-ness emerges in the Theme and Variations; the folk-song turns out to be Finnish. But that’s the least of many surprises. Coombs remains an unflappable but far from unimaginative guide throughout; tone and recording both remain unforced. I look forward with some excitement to the next instalments.'