TON and Leon Botstein have helped rescue a growing list of works from oblivion, rediscoveries that bring us wonderful music we might never have encountered otherwise and remind us there is more to music history than the standard fare. This album unites three German-speaking Jewish composers, born within a few years of one another in the first decade of the 20th century. All three were lucky enough to escape the Holocaust and start anew after the traumatic interruption of the war years. Their works recorded here were all written during the 1940s: in Jerusalem, Bombay (Mumbai) and Mexico City, respectively. They show three young composers striving to find their own voices, while at the same time trying to adapt to their new environments.

Telarc releases a compelling recording of Franz Liszt’s “Eine Symphonie zu Dantes Divina Commedia (Dante Symphony)” and “Tasso, lamento e trionfo” with the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leon Botstein and featuring London Oratory School Schola. The symphony is a typical mixture of Lisztian rhetoric and inspiration. The secret to success is to churn through the rhetoric without apologies, and to savor the inspiration when it comes.

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.

If you've seen the Leonard Bernstein biopic "Maestro", you've seen and heard The Orchestra Now, the exceptional ensemble that appears in the movie's Tanglewood Music Festival scene. The Orchestra Now (TON), a New York-based graduate-level training orchestra comprised of the most vibrant young musicians from around the globe, was founded by conductor, educator and music historian Leon Botstein, whose insatiable curiosity has resulted in rescuing countless musical works from oblivion. Their first recording for AVIE, "The Lost Generation", brings together three German-speaking composers who were contemporaries of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, but whose music became supressed by historical events of the 20th century.

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.