Glazunov’s Eighth Symphony was his last completed work in the genre. It is a work of a late romantic conservative but its ambitious nature – especially in the sombre slow movement – impressed his musical colleagues, including Shostakovich, who declared it to be his favourite.The work concluded a concert to celebrate twenty-five years of Glazunov’s composing life in early 1907, little more than a month after the premiere. (The programme began with the First Symphony he had written as a seventeen-year-old). Homages of this sort have always been a pleasure and a duty among Russian creative artists and in 1899 Glazunov himself had marked the centenary celebrations for the country’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, with his Commemorative Cantata. Glazunov stamps his personality on the Grand Duke Constanine Romanov’s rather four-square poetry by means of a bell-like refrain in the orchestra and with a pretty woodwind imitation of the poetic bird and angel imagery of the cantata’s ‘Berceuse’. It is here that the music comes closest to the world of the ballet The Seasons, completed in the same year.

The Poème lyrique takes us back to Glazunov’s precocious first steps in orchestral music. Although the score was not completed until 1887, he had sketched out ideas for it as early as 1882, the year when his First Symphony took the Russian musical scene by surprise. Tchaikovsky liked the piece enough to recommend it to his publisher, and his influence can be detected in the melancholy pastoral flute and clarinet solos.