It is only a short while since I reviewed Massi-miliano Damerini's Etcetera recording of the two piano sonatas, blowing hot and cold over so many sumptuous if over-extended ideas. Generally, in his piano music Glazunov was at his best as a miniaturist and like his co-romantics, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, he hardly filled out larger spaces with ease or an unerring sense of direction. Of the two sonatas the first is surely the more successful and even now I can recall the impact of its starry rhetoric when, as an impressionable teenager, I first heard it played by Leff Poushnov at a recital many years ago. As in her first volume of short pieces (see above), Tatyana Franova is anxious to keep everything on the move, lifting the composer's moderato qualification from the opening Allegro with a vengeance. The result is propulsive and exciting if hardly as expansive or full-blooded as Glazunov intended, and in the beautiful Andante she allows her excitement to spill over into pages that should surely provide a true oasis of calm. There is little sense of romantic heartache at 5'18'' (a crucial point in this tirelessly evolving reverie) and despite much surface fluency and bustle the incessantly active finale seems endless.
The same reservations apply to the Second Sonata, its finale ablaze with Schumann-inspired ebullient dotted rhythms, though Franova makes a more persuasive case for the surprisingly trenchant Prelude and Fugue in E minor. Personally, I would opt for Leslie Howard's Pearl recording of the sonatas though, clearly, the field is open for the most richly endowed virtuosos; for pianists with a genuine feel for Glazunov's endearing warmth as well as a command of the slalom-like twists and turns of his discursive arguments. Perhaps Olympia could look out Gilels's incomparable performance of the E minor Sonata for part of their invaluable Russian reissues.'