Love is in the Air

• Glazunov – Winter and Spring (from The Seasons)
• Glazunov – Concerto for Alto Saxophone
• Prokofiev – Fifth Symphony

In February we are still in the season of winter but anticipating the brighter days of spring so we will bring you these two seasons musically depicted in Glazunov’s sumptuous score, originally conceived for a ballet premiered in St Petersburg. Glazunov was criticised by younger composers, such as his pupil Prokofiev, for being old fashioned and he confounded some of this criticism when he wrote his Saxophone Concerto in 1934. The saxophone was still at that time an unfamiliar instrument in the orchestral repertoire but the famous German Saxophonist Sigurd Rascher apparently ‘hounded’ Glazunov to write him a piece. The concerto was finished in June 1934 although the composer did not live to hear a public performance. The concerto is in a single movement with lush accompanying orchestral texture for the solo saxophone.

Serge Prokofiev, Glazunov’s critical pupil, was born in a part of Russia which is now Ukraine. He studied at the famous St Petersburg Conservatoire and wrote his Fifth Symphony in B flat major after relocating from Paris to Moscow for financial reasons. The symphony was a fluent composition, completed in one month in 1944. Prokofiev declared the symphony to be "a hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit."