Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra

Russian composer Grigory Fried was born in 1915 into a family of Jewish intellectuals. In WWII he served at the Western front in a folk ensemble, and experienced the horrors of war, the bodily and mental terror of violence and suppression.

By 1901 Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov had already been a professor at the St Petersburg Conservatory for thirty years and had achieved considerable renown as a composer. Having written eleven operas of varying subject matter, his interest in folk

In 1978 Alfred Schnittke (1934-98) wrote the incidental music for a production of The Inspector's Tale, an adaptation for stage of Gogol's Dead Souls. It was to have been directed by Yuri Lyubimov, but the Soviet government banned the produ

Along with Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Khachaturian was one of the most famous and celebrated composers of the Soviet Union. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, his earliest musical influences were the folk music of Georgia and of his ancestral homel