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In the 1920s, Bartók was at the height of his fame as a leading composer of the modern age. But this great international response had only set in after the First World War. After a period of initial, well-received successes, Bartók, whose style became increasingly uncompromising and advanced, had been more or less ignored by home audiences and performances of his works were also rejected by his fellow artists. Bartók for his part rejected the prevailing spirit of the times and waited several years in a kind of inner exile.

„I’m scared of Bizet“, was Dmitri Shostakovich’s answer, when prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya turned for help with her lifelong dream: to create a CARMEN ballet. “You’ll be disappointed no matter what you write.”. The next composer to decline the nonsensical idea was Aram Khachaturyan. Composer no. 3 was found more accidentally: it was Rodion Shchedrin, who happened to be Plisetskaya’s husband. He wrote the entire score to the ballet’s movements and rhythms in only twenty days. Shchedrin called it “An arrangement of Bizet’s CARMEN for strings and percussion”.

In 1961 the then twenty-nine-year-old Yevgeny Yevtushenko published a poem entitled Babi Yar in the Literaturnaya gazeta. Babi Yar was the name of a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev which in 1941 had been the scene of a mass execution where, within the space of thirty-six hours, some 34.000 Jewish men, women and children were shot by a special unit of the German SS. In his poem Yevtushenko used the National Socialists‘ act of genocide as the starting-point of an attack on anti-Semitism in general, which he pilloried as a timeless evil that was widespread throughout the world, but which, he implied, was especially rife in Russia. Few Russian composers of the past were above reproach as far as anti-Semitism was concerned. Of these, the two that spring most immediately to mind are Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich.

This album is dedicated to two masterpieces of Russian film music. It is also a reminiscence to Saulius Sondeckis, one of the figureheads of the former Soviet Union chamber music scene, who died last year, and to Georgy Sviridov, whose 20th anniversary of death is around the corner next year.

This album presents four magnificent orchestral works by Mikahil Glinka, allowing an insight into his workshop at an early stage of his creative development. It reflects the encounter of Russian music tradition by form and genre – songs and dances – with the Italian art of singing – the belcanto – which Glinka became acquainted with during his years of travel. As of 1830 he spent three years in Italy to enhance his knowledge of the Italian opera. In this time he met in Milan Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti, getting familiar with the art of belcanto, which he later combined with the Russian vocal tradition thus creating the personal Glinka style.