This album contains the symphonic suite "Scheherazade" by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and the short composition "The Enchanted Lake" by his student Anatoly Lyadov.

In 1887-88, after the sudden death of his brilliant friend Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov composed those three orchestral works which crowned his Russian national period and has made his name a permanent part of the worldwide concert repertoire: the "Capriccio espagno"l, the symphonic suite "Scheherazade", and the concert overture "La Grande Pâque Russe". With Scheherazade Rimsky-Korsakov did not tell a story, he rather set individual, unconnected episodes and images to music.

Anatoly Lyadov has a reputation of being lazy – based solely on Rimsky-Korsakov’s opinion of him – yet his ambition was for every piece of music he created to be flawless. One consequence of this was that his entire œuvre consists entirely of miniatures. The "Enchanted Lake" does not tell a story but is purely impressionistic music about a Russian forest lake, on a level with Ravel and Debussy. Conductor Dmitri Kitayenko conducted various orchestras in Moscow, became chief conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic in 1976, and took over the Symphony Orchestra of the Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt am Main in 1990-96. He went on to hold principal positions with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bern Symphony Orchestra, the KBS Symphony Orchestra in Seoul and finally, in addition to his worldwide activities as a guest conductor, was appointed Honorary Conductor of the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne.

Violetta Fialko is an exceptionally talented Ukrainian pianist, who has been signed by Divine Art for her commercial recording debut, as winner of the 2021 Ciccolini Prize for Pianists, a new international competition which had to be held ‘virtually’ due to the Covid pandemic. At the time of writing this, Violetta is living in a part of Ukraine which has so far not been desecrated, having been evacuated from her home town. The audio masters arrived from the studio in Kyiv only days before the Russian attack, for which we are thankful, and we do not yet know if the studio still exists. Leaving the war aside, we have a brilliantly talented pianist who has chosen a varied and highly virtuosic program of Russian Romantic classics (though Prokofiev, to give him his due, was born in Ukraine). Violetta was born in 1997 into a family of musicians. She began to attend music school at the age of 5, and at 9 entered the Lysenko Specialized Music School in Kyiv, graduating with top honors in 2016 and entering the Kyiv Conservatory. She won many prizes, culminating in the 2021 Ciccolini Prize which has led to this album being made. She worked (until the current war began) as a teacher of piano performance and music theory, and is also a volunteer and program host on the Evangelical Radio station ‘Emmanuel’. We commend this album as the debut of a fantastic pianist and also in support of her home country and peace and freedom everywhere.

Lyadov’s handful of orchestral works have become concert favorites, but his choral music is as good as unknown. It falls into three main categories: religious chants, folksong arrangements and original compositions. All three confirm Lyadov’s status as a kind of Fabergé of music: they blend exquisite craftsmanship and delicate beauty. The Academy of Russian Music Chamber Choir is the part of the Academy of Russian Music, founded by Ivan Nikiforchin in 2016, which combines a chamber orchestra and a chamber choir. A distinctive feature of the ensemble is the performances of outstanding works of Russian music of the twentieth and 21st centuries. The basis of the Russian part of its repertoire is the scores for chamber orchestra by Russian composers of different generations – Yuri Abdokov, Revol Bunin, Herman Galynin, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Nikolai Peyko, Gavriil Popov, Dmitry Shostakovich, Georgy Sviridov, Boris Tchaikovsky, Galina Ustvolskaya and Mieczysław Weinberg. A special place in the repertoire is reserved for the string-orchestra transcriptions by Rudolf Barshai of Bach, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. The main concert venues in which the Academy of Russian Music performs are the Great Hall, the Small Hall and the Rachmaninov Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, and the Moscow International House of Music. The first Academy of Russian Music recording, with the complete music for strings by Herman Galynin (Toccata Classics tocc 0514), received a nomination in the International Classical Music Awards in 2021.