Alexander Glazunov - Violin Concerto, op. 82 in A minor

 ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV
Born St. Petersburg, 10 August 1865. Died Paris, 21 March 1936.
VIOLIN CONCERTO IN A MINOR, OP. 82
Composed in 1904-5 and first performed in St. Petersburg on February 17, 1905, with Glazunov's St. Petersburg Conservatory colleague, Leopold Auer, on the violin. (Among Auer's students were Nathan Milstein and Jascha Heifetz.) The score calls for solo violin, piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. The work lasts approximately 20 minutes.

Alexander Glazunov traveled to the west as a nineteen year old, where he came under the romantic spell of the music of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. Years later, in 1904, at the height of his career (and in the year Dmitri Kabalevsky was born), Glazunov wrote his deeply expressive violin concerto, a composition steeped in the rich expressiveness of the romantic tradition. Just as Wagner dissolves classical conventions and blends together the traditional forms in his operas, so too Glazunov obfuscates the boundaries of the three movements of his concerto, creating a panormaic emotional landscape. Just as Liszt raises teh solo instrument to the level of virtuosity, focusing attention on the artistic genius as a guiding light, so too Glazunov lets his solo violin rise above the orchestra in a dazzling display of technique. The virtuosity of the solo voice finds its spectacular climax in the final movement.

The Violin Concerto premiered in 1905. In the same year, Glazunov accepted the position of director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. At about the same time, farther west, Arnold SChoenberg began to experiment with a new music unrelated to any home key. This "atonal" technique would soon capture the iamgination of young composers. In Russie it was a time of revolutionary fervor, and Glazunov, as director of the St. petersberg conservatory, deftly lead his school through the turbulent years of czarist backlash, revolution, and the ideological directives of the new communist regime. Throughout the ebb and flow of Russia's political fortunes, Glazunov doggedly resisted the new atonal musical language of the time. Whether by inclination or political necessity, his opposition certainly helped him ride out the storms of the Russian revolution and the new Soviet era. It was especially this atonal technique that attracted the ire of the communist regime.