Glinka left disappointingly little purely orchestral music, and almost everything performable is here. To these captivating pieces, which should be much more frequently played in the West, the Life for the Tsar Suite is really a filler, though occupying more than half the record. It consists of the overture, four of the dances from the opera’s Polish act, and the short entr’acte linking Ivan Susanin’s death to the final Moscow celebrations.
The individual orchestral pieces include, of course, Kamarinskaya, the acorn containing within itself the entire oak of Russian music, as Tchaikovsky famously called it in his diary. The point of the remark lies in Glinka’s ability to vary melodies not by developing them but by constantly changing their harmonic, contrapuntal and orchestral textures. Tchaikovsky was entranced, as the finales of his Second and Fourth Symphonies most immediately show. Glinka influenced Tchaikovsky in other ways, too – with the melodic charm of the Valse- fantaisie, for example, where his own model was Weber’s Invitation to the Dance. What a pity that his orchestration of Weber’s original is lost, as it must surely have anticipated the famous version by Berlioz, under whose spell Glinka had fallen in Paris.
Tjeknavorian and the Armenian Philharmonic swing the waltz along nicely, and enjoy themselves greatly in the exoticisms of Glinka’s Spanish explorations which, as well as being immensely enjoyable in their own right, showed the way to composers including Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov. Quite an acorn.'