I would begin with Side 2, if I were you: start at the beginning, as I did, and you will risk apoplexy. Glazunov's first Greek Overture, written when he was 17 (immediately after the First Symphony), pretends to be a sonata allegro based on three folk-melodies, with a slow introduction that returns before the coda. The first two tunes are very brief and are dealt with in his usual manner: they are repeated sequence-wise, modified very slightly so that they can be fitted together into longer clauses, and their instrumental colouring is varied kaleidoscopically. There is little contrast or conflict between them, so the 'development' is really no such thing, but the colour is expertly deployed and the spacing of the quiet bits and the loud bits (very loud, some of them, but they are not 'climaxes', for all that) is efficient, and what more do you want from light music? The third melody, though, is a beautiful one, not just a scrap of local colour, a song called The price of a kiss, and to hear it subjected to the same process of Russification as the others—in this case it is played at quick march tempo, with a rat-a-plan side-drum accompaniment—is to sow the suspicion that Glazunov's famous technique may have been at bottom a rather tawdry, even vulgar thing.
For me that suspicion is abundantly confirmed by what follows: in the first of the Finnish Sketches the simple but dignified phrase to which the Kalevala is chanted is perked up with a few rhythmic displacements and subjected (it is only eight notes long) to four-and-a-half minutes of polychrome repetition; in the misnamed cortege solennel similar reiterations of a crudely heavy march tune dignify themselves with inconsequential cheek by quoting Luther's Ein feste Burg at their would-be apotheosis; in the Triumphal March another fine tune, John Brown's body, is cheapened beyond belief by the coarse way it is put through the sequence-machine and the automatic climax-builder and drenched every eight bars or so in the latest of master-chef Glazunov's 57 varieties of orchestral sauce.
Was there ever such a bad good composer? For there is no doubt that the orchestral poem Spring (which, after you have cried ''Faugh!'' or ''Pshaw!'' or some other bile-venting expression, you will find at the beginning of Side 2) was written by a good composer: it is like a scene from a charming pastoral ballet, its lyricism is fresh and natural, its interlude of bird-song and rustling leaves and flurries of wind is delightful, and its repetitions and permutations are sufficiently relaxed to keep one happily attentive for the whole of its 11 minutes. Any hope, however, that since the Poeme epique is a very late work it will also be a very good one is dashed as soon as one realizes that Glazunov actually thought it a good idea, since the piece was written for the Academie des Beaux Arts in Paris, to base it largely on the notes ACADE (mi = E)E. It is a rotten tune, and not even technique applied with a ladle can save it, nor the dull four-note fragment that does duty as 'second subject'. There is a third, chant-like idea that improves matters somewhat, but hunting for repetitions of that in the 13 minutes the work plays for is like picking the sixpence from a large and exceptionally indigestible Christmas pudding.
The Hong Kong Philharmonic, whose strings are a little under-nourished but are otherwise a good orchestra, play most of this music better than it deserves. The recording is perfectly acceptable.'