It’s May Day, so here for the occasion is “A May Day Overture,” by British composer Haydn Wood. Enjoy!

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Stretching the idea of the “tone poem” somewhat, here is Alexander Glazunov again, this time looking back in time rather than east in direction. This orchestral suite is called “From the Middle Ages,” and it is just that: a musical depiction, in Glazunov’s thinking, of the climate of medieval Europe. There are big melodic strokes here, to be sure (this is a Russian Romantic, after all), but there are also intimate expressions of medieval dance, the songs of the troubadours, and the marching of the knights off to Crusade. At times this piece almost evokes for me the finest in film music.

Here is Glazunov’s suite “From the Middle Ages.”

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There is something oddly seductive about the way the Russian Romantic composers, while trained in the musical traditions of the west, often looked eastward for inspiration. That exotic flavor lives so sparklingly in the work of Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, and is also found in the works of other Russians of the time, such as Alexander Glazunov. This work here, the Oriental Rhapsody, sounds like it belongs on a program of such music alongside Scheherazade and In the Steppes of Central Asia. It’s a musical tribute to an Asia-that-never-was, born in a time when the word “Orient” was used to sum up virtually a third of the entire world and all the peoples therein. There’s no real depiction of an actual Asia here, just an imagined one…but the imagination is powerful.

Here is Glazunov’s Oriental Rhapsody.

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