Two great Sonatas for the new century, really? In Alexandre Glazounov’s abundant piano production, these two opuses remain seldom performed. This neglect, only broken by Leslie Howard and then by Stephen Coombs as part of his complete works, underscores how Russian pianists have long turned away from these scores even as they delved into Tchaikovsky’s two Sonatas, to which Glazounov’s yield nothing. Emil Gilels is to my knowledge the only exception, having at least recorded the Second Sonata.

The perfection of form, the grand polyphonic games, even more sensitive in the second one dated 1902, whose Finale is constructed on a fugal subject, fail to mask the melodic inspiration, the narrative verve, the rather Schumann-like impulses that enhance the discourse and which Nikolay Medvedev seizes with poetry and audacity, whose first album combining Rachmaninov and Medtner I had loved so much.

He enlivens the impeccable structures, celebrates this classical romanticism that Glazounov proclaimed with so much art in the face of modernist audacity, sulfur, and the eroticism of Scriabin. A marvel among these sonic architectures, the Three Miniatures, small ballet scenes where the adamantine touch of this decidedly beautiful pianist invites delightful choreography, pure charm evoked in the final Waltz of this soon-to-be-lost world of imperial Russia.