Dmitry Shostakovich had a kind of protean musical genius that could take the shape of any container it was poured into. But what would have happened if his genius had been less adaptable? He might have ended up like Gavriil Popov: virtually unknown 100 years after his birth and 32 years since his death. These two composers had remarkably similar backgrounds. Both were daring young stars ascending in the Soviet firmament until the state intervened and censured them in the 1930's. Shostakovich adapted and recovered artistically; Popov did not. With this excellent new recording of Popov's early 1st Symphony, Leon Botstein and the London Symphony show us just how big Popov might have been. There are echoes of Shostakovich's tart writing, but there is also much that is original.

This new studio recording contains three works for piano and orchestra that virtuoso pianist Orion Weiss and conductor Leon Botstein first performed in concert at the Bard Music Festival. Together, the three works span almost a century of musical Romanticism and are as different from one another as the generations they represent. In each piece, the virtuoso genre becomes a means by which the composer responds to a specific source of inspiration – in the first case (Korngold), a performer and family friend who had suffered a horrendous tragedy, in the second (Rimsky-Korsakov), a venerated old master, and in the third (Chopin) a melody from a beloved opera.

Two very different takes on the romantic piano concerto, both equally successful. The Bliss – written in 1939 for the World’s Fair in New York – is extrovert, exuberant and virtuosic, the Rubbra a profound reflection on, and continuation of, the English pastoral tradition.