Alexander Glazunov - Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 92 (1911) {John Ogdon}

Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov (Алекса́ндр Константи́нович Глазуно́в, 10 August 1865 – 21 March 1936) was a Russian composer, music teacher, and conductor of the late Russian Romantic period. He served as director of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory between 1905 and 1928 and was instrumental in the reorganization of the institute into the Petrograd Conservatory, then the Leningrad Conservatory, following the Bolshevik Revolution. He continued heading the Conservatory until 1930, though he had left the Soviet Union in 1928 and did not return.The best-known student under his tenure during the early Soviet years was Dmitri Shostakovich.

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Piano Concerto No. 1 in f minor, Op. 92 (1911)
Dedication: Leopold Godovsky

1. Allegro moderato (0:00)
2. Theme and Variations (12:37)

John Ogdon, piano and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paavo Berglund

Details by Philipp Leibbrandt, 2017
It was at a relatively late stage that Glazunov devoted himself to the composition of a piano concerto. Admittedly, the first beginnings of the F minor concerto, op. 92, go back to 1889/1890, but it was not until 1910/1911 that he completed the piece, interrupting work on a ninth symphony that in the end remained unfinished. A second piano concerto in B flat major followed in 1917 as opus 100.
Glazunov was certainly a good pianist who had begun playing as a young boy, but the creation of large-scale orchestral works and symphonies was in the foreground for him. As is clear from a letter of the summer of 1910 to the pianist Konstantin Igumnov, the soloist at the first performance on Feb. 24, 1912, the conception of the piano part caused Glazunov difficulties. For that reason he sent his sketches and drafts to the pianist and subsequent dedicatee, Leopold Godowsky, who, to Glazunov’s relief, had few criticisms to make of the piano part: “All that remain are the piano parts, but I’m encountering every possible obstacle: there are constant doubts about what to assign to the piano and what to the orchestra. Furthermore, although I understand the piano, I am still unschooled in it, and what is comfortable for me may not be practical to a specialist and vice-versa. It is comfortable that (Leopold) Godovsky, to whom I gave my sketches, did not have many comments.”1

The experience of the orchestra and of instrumentation that he had acquired with the composition of his numerous orchestral works is clearly evident in the orchestral writing of the op. 92 piano concerto. For even if it lies in the nature of the genre that the piano plays the main part in the concerto, Glazunov’s F minor concerto has clearly symphonic features, with the piano just the most prominent of the instruments.

Conceived as a two-movement work, the concerto is remarkable, first, for the absence of a central movement. Furthermore, the last movement is an extended set of variations, which is equally untypical for the piano concerto as a genre.

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