Weinberg Symphony 17

String Quartet No. 5 was written in the autumn of 1945 and was performed on 17 May 1947 in Moscow by the Beethoven Quartet, to whom it was dedicated. Years later, the composer returned to this Quartet and arranged it for orchestra as the four-movement Chamber Symphony No. 3, Op. 151 (performed on 18 November 1991). It was several years before that he had first begun to turn to his scores from almost half a century earlier, and he already had 17 string quartets under his belt. It was also then that he arranged his String Quartets No. 2 and No. 3 as Chamber Symphonies No. 1 and No. 2, and in the summer of 1987 that he confided to a friend: “I’m looking through the baggage of my youth. Sometimes I find something in there that is worth rethinking.”

Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream with this 11x CD,s box set gathering all 11 volumes in the classic Electric Psychedelic Sitar Headswirlers series. It's packed with Eastern-tinged rock, pop, and folk from the hippie heyday of the late '60s and early '70s, as well as the more recent psychedelic revival. Featuring over 200 tracks from acts from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as India, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Australia, and elsewhere, it comes complete with an 84-page full-color booklet offering background info, detailed biographies, full discographies, and rare photos, making it a truly essential trip back to psychedelia's incense-shrouded golden age.

In 1978 Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) wrote the incidental music for a production of The Inspectors Tale, an adaptation for stage of Gogols Dead Souls. It was to have been directed by Yuri Lyubimov, but the Soviet government banned the production. A suite was assembled from the score by Gennadi Rozhdenstvensky, and two leading colleagues of Schnittke - Gubaidulina and Denisov contributed a jointly composed march, which opens this CD. In 1985 the music was choreographed, the ballet, called Esquisses was performed at the Bolshoi. Schnittke composed a number of new pieces for this production. The characters in the action are all from Gogol, but in addition to The Dead Souls, we meet Tchitchikov, Major Kovalyovs Nose, and Ferdinand VIII from Notes of a Madman. A passage from the book is recited in his piece, and is read by the conductor on this CD. The music is a poly-stylistic, with a huge orchestra (2 electric guitars, flexatone, prepared piano with coins inserted between the strings), quotations from Beethoven, Haydn, Tchaikovsky - all with a sense of devilish mischief which suites ideally the grotesque nature of many of Gogols characters.

Hans Fryba (24 April 1899 – 3 January 1986) – an Austrian composer and double bassist. He graduated in Vienna in the double bass class of Eduard Madenski. He continued his instrumental career, performing with orchestras such as the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra of Megaron Mousikis. Due to his outstanding performance skills, Fryba requires similar virtuosity from the instrumentalist in his compositions. Despite the fact that his work includes only three pieces for double bass, each of them contains an individual compositional feature and a number of technical and musical difficulties. To this day, the most frequently performed work is the Old Style Suite, which, also due to its sound qualities, is often performed during international double bass competitions.