Ode to Kyiv and its epic heroes

The Kyiv-born Russian composer of German-Polish origin Reinhold Glière (1875-1956) certainly didn't shy away from a challenge. In his programmatic Symphony N°3 B minor ‘Il’ya Muromets’(1909-1911), he wrote a gigantic work with a sequence of four tone poems that would give Franz Liszt a run for his money, with orchestration that would make even Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov quake in his boots, with a harmonic expressiveness that combines Wagner's Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde, and with a length and instrumentation that nearly equals Mahler's Third Symphony. In brief: late Romanticism turned up to the full! Based on the folk legends of his country of birth, this work recounts the heroic deeds of Ilya Muromets, a bogatyr or epic hero of the medieval Principality of Kyiv who fought evil but was eventually turned to stone himself. Anyone seeking to take on this work better have the strength and ingenuity to match Ilya Muromets — or Alain Altinoglu, or course!