Immensely influential, the remarkable Symphonie fantastique was composed while Hector Berlioz was suffering an intense and unreciprocated passion for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson. Its autobiographical tale describes a young musician’s opium-poisoned nightmares of jealous despair and fatal justice following the murder of his beloved. Berlioz wrote a second movement cornet solo into a subsequent revision of the score, here included as an optional extra. He wed his sweetheart actress but, recuperating in Nice, wrote Le corsaire after the final break-up of their marriage.

The legendary American pianist Byron Janis, who turns 95 in March 2023, was the first pupil of another iconic pianist - Vladimir Horowitz. Horowitz famously told Janis 'I don't want you to be a 'second Horowitz' I want you to be a 'first Janis'.' Janis certainly established himself on the world stage when he made his Carnegie Hall debut recital in October 1948, garnering a rave review from the New York Times' Olin Downes who praised him as a distinctive artist in his own right destined for a major career. Between 1960 and 1964 Janis made a set of remarkable recordings for the Mercury Living Presence label.

…Music of radiant splendour, full of affirmation… With Janice Watson, Della Jones, Martyn Hill and Donald Maxwell as soloists, the LSO Chorus in marvellous voice and glowing orchestral playing, the Missa takes its rightful place alongside its illustrious.

Alfred Schnittke's Second Concerto Grosso is a different creature than his First. While the 1977 Concerto Grosso No. 1 for 2 Violins, Strings and Keyboards is a lithe, vicious, often comical work, the Second, finished five years later, is a weightier affair. The soloists are now violin and cello; the Baroque band is now a full orchestra with electric guitar, drum kit, and brake drum; there are four large movements rather than six smaller ones; the entire work is imbued with an air of sincere tragedy, albeit with mud on its shoes. Schnittke dedicated the work to its premiere soloists, husband-and-wife duo Oleg Kagan (violin) and Natalia Gutman (cello); famed for their flawless ensemble, the couple inspired in Schnittke a musical air of companionship – a single soul in two instruments.

After Tchaikovsky, but with Glazunov, and before Stravinsky and the rest, Nikolai Tcherepnin (1873-1945) made a not so quiet contribution to the continuing development of the Russian ballet. But he was quite an overshadowed figure, in large part due to the success of Stravinsky & his son, Alexander Tcherepnin and to modernist trends that became prevalent by the early Twentieth Century (Nikolay’s music remains rooted in the sound-worlds and mannerisms of Tchaikovsky, Massenet, and Faure). But the language of "Narcisse et Echo" (1911) and telling subtleties in its orchestral resources point to Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe" written a year later.

A logical, albeit rare, association of symphonies by Balakirev, the composer of Islamey and Tamara He was the cornerstone of the Russian Mighty Five: César Cui, Aleksandr Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov and Mily Balakirev, who in the 1860s banded together in an attempt to create a truly national school of Russian music; free of the stifling influence of Italian opera, German lieder, and other western European forms. In this album two prestigious conductors do them justice. Symphony No.1 in C major is a romantic and well constructed work, performed by the early Karajan/Walter Legge team and the Philharmonia was certainly a crack ensemble at the time. The 2nd Symphony, which has with some justice been described as a paler copy of the 1st, brings an opening movement which under Rozhdestvensky s baton moves forward strongly, generating much Slavic energy. Digitally remastered.

While the Symphony No. 6 in C minor, Op. 58, of 1896 by Alexander Glazunov is not the most personally characteristic of his eight completed symphonies – the optimistic Third or the Olympian Fifth are more typical of his confident symphonic aesthetic – it is arguably the most typically Russian of his symphonies. Part of the reason for this is the scoring – violins in octaves above massed brass at its climaxes à la Tchaikovsky and gorgeously colorful woodwind writing in its central movements – part of it is the themes – ardent and powerful with a yearning quality characteristic of fin de siècle Russian symphonies – but most of it is the furious tone of the opening movement.

Alexander Glazunov composed his Symphony No. 3 in D major, Op. 33, in 1890. The symphony is dedicated to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and was first performed in St. Petersburg in December 1890 under the baton of Anatoly Lyadov. The symphony is considered a transitional work, with Glazunov largely eschewing the influences of Balakirev, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov inherent in his earlier symphonies for the newer influences of Tchaikovsky and Wagner. Because of this change, the Third has been called the "anti-kuchkist" symphony in Glazunov's output (kuchkist kuchka, the shortened Russian name for the nationalist music group The Five"). He would tone down these new influences in his subsequent symphonies as he strove for an eclectic mature style.

A wonderfully gifted child, the Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) occupies a completely unique place in the history of music, in which he is only just beginning to feature. A virtuoso organist at the age of eleven, he composed a First Symphony at the age of seventeen. An hour long, it was performed for the first time by no less than the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1913. But Langgaard was too visionary, too original, too far from fashion and the common world to be successful.

Dutch composer Matthijs Vermeulen’s wildly complex and inventive music resists easy classification, and yet it does not really do his work justice to say it is an amalgam of Berg, Varèse, Ives, Hartmann, Pettersson, and others. But in effect that is just what it is–an inscrutable, polymelodic kitchen-sink approach to composition. And it is no less fascinating as a result. At once relentless, frantic, fierce, and desolate, Vermeulen’s compositions were barely performed during his own lifetime (1888-1967), and he did not help his cause by systematically estranging himself from the musical establishment (Mengelberg, among others).

The Nursery (Russian: Детская, Detskaya, literally Children's [Room]) is a song cycle by Modest Mussorgsky set to his own lyrics, composed between 1868 and 1872. The cycle was published in two series. Only the first two songs survive of the second series. During the late ’60s and early ’70s, Schnittke’s experiments with form and compositional style produced several important works: the Violin Sonata “Quasi una sonata” (1968), the First Symphony (1969-72), the Suite in the Olden Style (1972), and the Requiem (1975). It was during this period that Schnittke composed In memoriam…, which he adapted from his Piano Quintet (1972-76).

The outstanding conductor, teacher, pianist and wonderful storyteller Gennady Rozhdestvensky's another unique talent is to discover unknown and forgotten pages of music of different periods. Many of his concerts turn into a fascinating journey of unexplored monuments of Russian and European music. This double album features unfamiliar compositions played four hands by Rozhdestvensky and the remarkable pianist Viktoria Postnikova with Rozhdestvensky playing three (!) instruments – harpsichord, organ and piano. Apart from better known sonatas by Mozart and a fantasia by Schubert, the listeners will discover organ fugues composed by Schubert and a friend of his, a famous composer and conductor of his time Franz Lachner, a harpsichord sonata by Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (Johann Sebastian's ninth son), eight-hand compositions by the Czech classic Bedřich Smetana, and unfairly forgotten arrangements of Russian folk songs by the founder of The Five Mily Balakirev.