In common with most Russian composers, piano music holds a significant place in the works of Alexander Glazunov, exhibiting his skill as a miniaturist, the elegance of his salon music, his harmonic adventurism, and his mastery of counterpoint and large-scale forms.

Volume 1 opens, appropriately, with Glazunov's first published piano composition, the Suite on the name 'SASCHA', a remarkably assured work containing many of the devices which were to become features of Glazunov's later piano writing. The programme continues with a selection of waltzes reflecting the cosmopolitan society of nineteenth-century St Petersburg.

Finally we have the first of Glazunov's two piano sonatas. The work bristles with technical difficulties but remains a very controlled work, never allowed to spill over into emotionalism.