There is music here from either end of Grechaninov's long career, and a group of songs from his middle years. The symphony was written when he was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov in the 1890s, and is in more than token ways dedicated to the well-loved teacher who also conducted the first performance. It was not a success, and Vasily Yastrebtsev records in his Reminiscences that Rimsky-Korsakov had private doubts about the work: ''It's really not good if someone who has a natural inclination to compose in the style of Rubinstein, and writes fairly well in this style, suddenly takes a fancy to Borodin and begins to compose in his style. It won't work.'' It works only as a fluent exercise in the Russian symphony as it was still alive and reasonably well in those years; but there is certainly skill, and considerable charm in the scherzo (where Tchaikovsky joins Borodin as father figure).
The songs are amiable little settings of some poems about childhood experiences, to poems by poets as distinguished as Blok and Balmont, sentimental but as well-wrought as everything Grechaninov wrote. There is the skill of a long-experienced artist who does not fear simplicity with the Missa Sancti Spiritus of 1943, a touching setting of the Roman Catholic Mass by a composer who had made some effective settings of the Orthodox Liturgy and also attempted a reconciliation far ahead of his time with a Missa Oecumenica, attempting to embrace East and West, in 1944. The music is at its most effective in the quieter reflections, the Kyrie, Benedictus and Agnus Dei. Valery Polyansky clearly has a warm affection and sympathy for this gentle idiom, which Grechaninov preserved through long years of political and musical upheaval, and he conveys this well to his performers.'