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Pristine XR remastering has made huge inroads on poor sound,
It’s almost certainly the first western-made recording of the work, beaten into 2nd place by a Russian recording a year earlier in St. Petersburg - we've been unable to trace any earlier recordings, though it was already 55 years old by the time that debut recording had been made. A review of the LP issue of this recording in The Record Guide noted:
With this in mind, it is no surprise perhaps to discover that this has been a recording that's been a long time coming - effectively awaiting the technology that might rescue it from oblivion. Whilst there still seems, to me, something rather odd going on at the very beginning, one is quickly drawn into the performance, and the sound itself seems to pick up once past those opening bars. I've had to leave a reasonable degree of hiss in this remastering - something you'll adjust to very quickly - in order to fully preserve what is available to us in terms of sound quality. I also managed to tame a bizarrely accentuated bass which at times seemed ready to overwhelm, as well as correcting some very unusual pitch fluctuations. Given the recording date I'd imagine this to be an early tape recording - perhaps one where the teething problems associated with new technologies were still to be ironed out.
Glazunov biographical notes from Wikipedia
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Glazunov (Russian: Александр Константинович Глазунов, Aleksandr Konstantinovič Glazunov; French: Glazounov; German: Glasunow; August 10, 1865 – March 21, 1936) was a major Russian composer, as well as an influential music teacher. Glazunov was born in St Petersburg. He studied music under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, at the recommendation of Mily Balakirev, whom he had met at the age of 14. The first of his nine symphonies premiered in 1882 when Glazunov was 16 years old. His popular symphonic poem Stenka Razin also stems from that period. His work started to become well known both in Russia and beyond, due partly to the advocacy of Franz Liszt. Following his conducting debut in 1888, he was appointed conductor for the Russian Symphony Concerts series in 1896. In 1897, he was the conductor at the disastrous premiere of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No 1. This failed utterly at its first attempt, partly because Glazunov seemed to be drunk at the time. In 1899, Glazunov became a professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, and later its director, where he remained until the events of 1917. After the end of World War I, he was instrumental in the reorganization of the Leningrad Conservatory. Glazunov left Russia in 1928. He toured Europe and the United States, and settled in Paris, where he died. He always claimed that the reason for his continued departure from Russia was "ill health"; this enabled him to remain a respected composer in the Soviet Union, unlike Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff, who had left for other reasons. In 1929, Glazunov conducted an orchestra of Parisian musicians in the first complete electrical recording of The Seasons. This recording was later reissued on LP and CD; it shows him to be a very competent conductor. He came to be acknowledged as a great prodigy in his field, and with the help of his mentor and friend Rimsky-Korsakov, finished some of Alexander Borodin's great works, the most famous being the opera Prince Igor, including the popular Polovetsian Dances. He reconstructed the overture from memory, having heard it played only once. Shostakovich reports, however, that Glazunov's "reconstruction" of Borodin's overture was actually original work; Glazunov chose to give full credit to Borodin for the composition which he, Glazunov, wrote. See Solomon Volkov's "Testimony," the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. Glazunov's ability to perfectly mimic Borodin's style is a tribute to his musical creativity. Glazunov died in Paris at the age of 70. Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Glazunov
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