Dedicated to the memory of Franz Liszt, Alexander Glazunov's Symphony No. 2 (1886) was the composer's impressive follow-up to the Symphony No. 1 (1881 - 82), an instant and popular success some four years earlier. The product of a student in his 20th year, the Second Symphony is a work of subtlety and delicacy that seems far more mature than might be expected from someone of the composer's relative youth. The finale perhaps represents a somewhat lesser order of achievement than the rest of the work, but the symphony as a whole is immensely satisfying. The Second Symphony had its genesis in the nationalist fervor that was prevalent in Russia in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It has a particular expressive affinity with Borodin's Symphony No. 2 (1869 - 75), with which it shares a remarkable lyric quality. After the its premiere in St. Petersburg in 1886, Glazunov chose the Second Symphony to introduce his work to world at large at the Paris World Exhibition in 1889. In thus selecting this work, Glazunov showed his innate understanding of the changing musical tastes outside Russia at that time. Anticipating Diaghilev by twenty years, the young composer knew that Western audiences were developing a fascination for the barbaric and mythical rather than merely admiring music on the basis of its structural sophistication. The Second Symphony delivers on what Glazunov sensed as the contemporary demand, from its Tchaikovskian lyricism to the overtly earthy and fundamentally Russian pagan nature of the finale. The Second Symphony is a prophetic work, a harbinger of the symphonic cycle which would come to be Glazunov's principal musical legacy.

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