The Symphony No. 8 in E flat major, Op. 83, from 1906 by Alexander Glazunov (1865 - 1936) was his last completed symphony: he started a Symphony No. 9 in 1910, but only finished an opening movement before permanently shelving the work. While the Ninth and the works following it evince a decline in inspiration, the Eighth is one of the greatest of Glazunov's symphonies, a brilliantly composed work of distinguished themes integrated into compelling architectural forms. If the Eighth has a flaw, it is that it hardly sounds like the work of a Russian composer of the Silver Age. The fashionable despair and the stylish taste for the apocalyptic that mars the works of other fin de siècle Russian composers is nowhere in evidence in the Eighth. Like Glazunov's earlier symphonies, the Eighth is a powerfully positive symphony with affirmation its aesthetic and exultation its goal. More to the point, however, Glazunov's Eighth synthesizes the Western and Russian tendencies in his previous symphonies. While his earlier symphonies had used Russian themes in Western formal structures, the Eighth's themes are supra-national—they could have as easily been written by Dukas, Alfvén, or Parry as by a Russian—and the Eighth's forms—sonata form invested with variational tendencies and contrapuntal writing—are as typical of the writing of Mahler and Reger as of Glazunov. The result is Glazunov's most successful symphony: a work whose compositional unity is matched by its emotional effectiveness. Like all Glazunov's earlier symphonies except the Fourth, the Eighth is cast in the standard four-movement form. But these forms are deepened by the intellectual concentration of Glazunov's thought: the opening Allegro moderato's two themes are combined in the contrapuntal development section; the Mesto that follows has the baleful intensity of the slow movement of Elgar's Symphony No. 2, but distilled to its emotional essence; the Finale's hymn-like main theme is superbly developed and brought to its highest state in the movement and the work's coda. Although Glazunov's music was rejected by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich as old-fashioned and by audiences for not being as pessimistic as Rachmaninov or as orgasmic as Scriabin's, his Symphony No. 8 is as fine a work as the best composed in Russia in the Silver Age.

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