Tone Poem Tuesday

I don’t know anything at all about this piece. I heard it while driving to work one morning last week, and I liked it quite a lot. It’s a dramatic and romantic miniature by Anatoly Liadov, called About Olden Times. Liadov is a composer I haven’t heard much at all, mainly because he appears to have mostly written “miniature” works, at least some of which may have been written with the intention of using them as part of longer works that never reached completion. Still, what little Liadov I’ve heard has been like what we have here: lyrical and potent pieces that manage to make their point in less time even than a typical Franz von Suppe overture. I am often drawn to the big-and-epic, but there’s something to be said for short-and-sweet, too.