Alexander Glazounov

Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov (10 August [O.S. 29 July] 1865 – 21 March 1936) was a Russian composer, music teacher, and conductor of the late Russian Romantic period. He was director of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory between 1905 and 1928 and was instrumental in the reorganization of the institute into the Petrograd Conservatory, then the Leningrad Conservatory, following the Bolshevik Revolution. He continued as head of the Conservatory until 1930, though he had left the Soviet Union in 1928 and did not return. The best-known student under his tenure during the early Soviet years was Dmitri Shostakovich.

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Alexander Glazunov was born in St. Petersburg. When he was fourteen he had been composing for three years and got a recommendation from Balakirev to study with Rimsky-Korsakov.
A lifelong friendship developed between the two and Rimsky-Korsakov said of his student that he progressed “not from day to day but from hour to hour”.
The first of Glazunov´s nine symphonies premiered when he was 16 years old. Glazunov was also a very competent conductor, even if he is said to have been drunk when conducting Rachmaninoff´s first symphony at its disastrous première in 1897.
He left Russia in 1928, toured Europe and the United States, and eventually settled in Paris, where he died.
Glazunov´s most popular works are the ballets The Seasons and Raymonda. For piano, he wrote two sonatas and a fair amount of smaller pieces: waltzes, etudes, preludes and fugues as well as two fantasies for double piano.