Symphony No. 2
To the Memory of Liszt
A young composer's tribute to a departed master, ambitious in scale and darker in tone than the First, reaching for grandeur and formal weight rather than folk charm.
Composed between 1884 and 1886 and dedicated to the memory of Franz Liszt, who died in July 1886, the Second Symphony marks Glazunov stretching toward a larger, more monumental conception. Liszt had championed the younger Russian nationalists, and the dedication acknowledges a debt. The music answers it with an expansive, serious argument, its F-sharp minor tonality giving the work a graver cast than its predecessor.
The symphony gained Glazunov international attention when it was performed at the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris, one of the events that carried Russian music westward and helped establish his name abroad. Listeners and critics noted the structural command and the assured handling of the orchestra in a composer barely past twenty.
The scoring is fuller and more richly layered than in the First, with a broader dynamic range and a taste for sustained, hymn-like passages in the brass. The work still carries the harmonic and melodic fingerprints of the Balakirev circle, but the developmental ambition points forward. It is a transitional statement, national in accent yet clearly reaching for the cosmopolitan symphonic tradition Liszt embodied.
Movements
Recordings coming soon
The individual movements will be uploaded here.