The Symphony No. 3 in D major, Op. 33 (1890), is a grandly confident and serenely hopeful work by a composer of 25 who had already proven himself a master at the premiere of his magnificent Symphony No. 1 nine years earlier. Nor were Glazunov and his audience the only ones who thought he was a great composer; his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and his friend Tchaikovsky both recognized his greatness. In many ways, Glazunov's Symphony No. 3 is, even more than his Symphony No. 1, a fusion of the nationalism of Rimsky-Korsakov and the cosmopolitanism of Tchaikovsky, the symphony's dedicatee. The use of the trombones to proclaim a "Fate" motive, the dancing Scherzo with its delicate glockenspiel, its ardent Andante: all of these things recall Tchaikovsky's own symphonies. However, these recollections of Tchaikovsky are lightened by the lessons Glazunov had learned from the master orchestrator Rimsky-Korsakov and by Glazunov's own intrinsic optimism. The Third opens with a lyrical first theme in D major for the violins that gives way to a more impassioned second theme, stated first by the trombones in D flat major. Both starting a symphony with a lyrical theme and then modulating to the flat tonic were structural innovations that no other symphonist of the time had yet devised. Yet Glazunov's innovation, for all its boldness, is used with complete self-assurance. The Scherzo in F major—a key that had been the pivotal in the opening movement's development—floats its melodies atop waves of rhythm. The Andante in C sharp minor—the parallel minor of the key of the second theme of the opening movement—has a melody as beautiful and affecting as any ever written by Tchaikovsky, but Glazunov's warm-hearted scoring for clarinet and then oboe and English horn is all his own. The closing Allegro moderato strides through constantly accelerating tempos and intensifying textures to a climax in which the hope of the symphony's opening is fulfilled.

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