With this disc Demidenko completes his cycle of the Prokofiev Concertos with the London Philharmonic and Alexander Lazarev. The First Concerto launched the youthful composer's career—he wrote it for his graduation concert (his playing of it won him first prize) and its youthful high spirits and virtuosity make it an instant crowd-pleaser. The Fourth and Fifth Concertos are less well known though with the Fifth it is hard to see why. The Fourth was written for the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein who didn't like it (he didn't like Ravel's left-hand Concerto either!) and refused to perform it; hence it is only recently that the work has been taken up.

When one considers the life of Nikolai Karlovich Medtner it is impossible not to be amazed by his strange, tragic and yet marvellous destiny. He was recognized in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century as one of the most important composers and was, with Scriabin and Rachmaninov, an extremely influential, almost ‘cult’ figure for a whole generation of the Russian intellectual élite. He was also a great pianist and an outstanding musical thinker. His personality was completely divorced from everyday life, but the depth and power of his intellect, entirely absorbed in music, philosophy and the history of culture, were deeply respected by such contemporaries as Nikisch, Rachmaninov, Furtwängler, Koussevitsky, Glazunov and Prokofiev.

Boris Godunov is the quintessential Russian opera and brings to the stage one of the most curious episodes in the history of 16th-century Russia. After Mussorgsky's death in 1881, the work was revised by Rimsky-Korsakov whose version is sung in this performance.