These are good enough performances of the Symphonies No. 5 and No. 7 of Glazunov, performances well enough conducted by
Tadaaki Otaka and played by the
BBC National Orchestra of Wales so that you will not actually mind listening to them, but they are performances not good enough to make you think Glazunov's symphonies are actually worth listening to. And is there anything worse to be said about a performance than that it so devalues the music that the composer seems negligible? While this would be bad enough in a performance of, say, Tchaikovsky, a composer nearly everybody knows is worth listening to, it is even worse in performances of music by a composer whom few listeners know and fewer care about. In more than good enough performances of Glazunov, in performances by
Rozhdestvensky or
Fedoseyev or
Anissimov, or, especially,
Mravinsky or
Golovanov, Glazunov sounds more than good enough. He sounds like the greatest Russian composer of the Silver Age, a composer who was the heir to Borodin, the equal of Rimsky-Korsakov, and the superior of
Rachmaninov. In the great
Mravinsky recording, the Fifth is Olympian in its masterful strength and magisterial power. In the great
Golovanov recording, the Seventh is Elysian in its pastoral lyricism and bucolic radiance. In the merely good enough
Otaka recordings, the Fifth is inconsequential, the Seventh is forgettable, and Glazunov is not worth listening to. BIS' sound is a bit too reverberant and a little too hard.