Mikhashoff Songs And Dances

This is a fresh, vibrant recording of a cross-section of Dowland's music, and will quickly dispel any myth of Dowland always being a composer of melancholy!
The singers use Elizabethan pronunciation (love=loov, come=coom), which can be quite revelatory. – Mark Ardrey-Graves

… you get here is perhaps the best of all worlds: a major symphonic work idiomatically played by a first-rate virtuoso orchestra under the hands of a conductor whose contact with the work looks back to the symphony's very creation, captured in vivid, realistic sound none of the russian maestros mentioned above could ever aspire to.

Through his far-reaching endeavors as composer, performer, educator, and ethnomusicolgist, Béla Bartók emerged as one of the most forceful and influential musical personalities of the twentieth century. Born in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Romania), on March 25, 1881, Bartók began his musical training with piano studies at the age of five, foreshadowing his lifelong affinity for the instrument. Following his graduation from the Royal Academy of Music in 1901 and the composition of his first mature works – most notably, the symphonic poem Kossuth (1903) – Bartók embarked on one of the classic field studies in the history of ethnomusicology. With fellow countryman and composer Zoltán Kodály, he traveled throughout Hungary ……..

From Allmusic

This disc brings together a selection of songs by the five members of the Mighty Handful, and serves as a useful and economical introduction to their Read more The Miserly Knight, Alexander Serov’s Judith (both on Harmonia Mundi), and Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery (BMG). He also appears in recordings of Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night and Shostakovich’s unfinished opera The Gamblers (both on Capriccio), as well as a recording of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis conducted by Antal Doráti (BIS). He has performed with major opera companies throughout the world. I have not been able to discover the reason for his name change, but it appears that at a certain point he emigrated to the U.S. You would learn little of this history from the Naxos notes.

Soghomon Soghomonian, ordained and commonly known as Komitas, (Armenian: Կոմիտաս; 26 September 1869 – 22 October 1935) was an Armenian priest, musicologist, composer, arranger, singer, and choirmaster, who is considered the founder of Armenian national school of music. He is recognized as one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology.
–wiki .