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Russian Reflections Disc 6 (2016)

From the nationalist-minded autodidacticism of its beginnings, the modern tradition of Russian classical music bore the unmistakable stamp of its cultural heritage: Glinka and “the Five”—Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov— eschewed Western classicism in order to find their own, distinctly Russian, path. But nearing the turn of the twentieth century, as this tradition developed, a new generation of composers embraced the rigorous technical standards of Brahms and others of their Western counterparts, creating a powerful new repertoire: music as impeccably crafted as the most masterly German scores, yet with its Russian soul blazing more brightly than ever. Disc 6 celebrates the mastery of Russian music in the generation following Tchaikovsky, juxtaposing music by Taneyev with the Opus 88 Quintet of Johannes Brahms, whose craftsmanship remains unsurpassed over a century later.

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