Les Sylphides is a short, non-narrative ballet blanc to piano music by Frédéric Chopin, selected and orchestrated by Alexander Glazunov.
Anna Pavlova in Les Sylphides, 1909
Scene from a performance in Baku, 2014
1909 set design by Alexandre Benois
Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov 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.
Portrait of Glazunov by Ilya Repin, 1887
Glazunov family coat of arms
Portrait of Mitrofan Belyayev by Ilya Repin (1886)
Glazunov before 1913