01 Rhapsody Concerto I. Moderato

On this Regis Records digital recording acclaimed soloist Marina Tarasova plays with total passion and commitment throughout. She is particularly impressive in the extended languorous passage in the second movement andante sostenuto that evolves into an intensified lament.

It's a tall order to compile the best classical music of the twentieth century, but EMI has selected its top 100 classics for this six-disc set, and it's difficult to argue with most of the choices. Without taking sides in the great ideological debates of the modern era – traditionalist vs. avant-garde, tonal vs. atonal, styles vs. schools, and so on – the label has picked the composers whose reputations seem most secure at the turn of the twenty-first century and has chosen representative excerpts of their music. Certainly, the titans of modernism are here, such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, and Benjamin Britten, to name just a few masters, but they don't cast such a large shadow that they eclipse either their more backward-looking predecessors or their more experimental successors.

The company "Melody" presents the jubilee set "Young Slava", dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the birth of Mstislav Rostropovich.

The company "Melody" presents the jubilee set "Young Slava", dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the birth of Mstislav Rostropovich.