The second volume of Naxos’s Glazunov series has most of the ingredients of the first (8/96) – same orchestra, same venue, same production team. Only the conductor is different; and one can’t help feeling that if the company had stayed with Alexander Anissimov, the perceptive interpreter of the complete Raymonda, then these fitfully inspired orchestral fondants might have sounded more convincing. Glazunov’s looser constructions – the outer movements of The Kremlin, the Crusader-finale of From the Middle Ages – need a firmer hand to move them on than Konstantine Krimets provides; though it’s hardly his fault if the composer’s last orchestral work soon sticks fast in the mud. Glazunov’s Poeme epique was completed in 1934, two years before his death, in homage to Paris’s Academie des Beaux Arts, with a tribute patterned out in notes to serve as the cumbersomely developed main idea; and while it would be unfair to expect Glazunov, child of the late romantic era, to have moved on, his other nostalgic retrospectives do him more honour than this.
The rest is pleasurable enough. The Moscow Symphony players show real feeling for the orthodox choruses and bellsongs of The Kremlin’s middle movement, “In the Cloister”, where the dedicatee of the young Glazunov’s tableau symphonique, Mussorgsky, is most present in spirit; and the extra Russian brass make a fine contribution to the finale, adding much-needed definition. Krimets’s way with the Middle Ages suite is much less focused than Jarvi’s on Chandos, if the orchestral playing is at times more subtle; yet the first movement’s balancing-act between love and storm music in brief homage to Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini and The Tempest, and the selective scoring of the Scherzo’s Dance of Death – first-rate encore material – still make their mark. The sound seems more diffuse than on the complete Raymonda, but surely Krimets is to blame for a lack of clarity in string phrasing.'