Concertgebouw Orkest Rimski Korsakov Scheherazade Krill

It was Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov's older brother, Voin, who first put ideas of travel, ships and the sea into the would-be composer's head. The young Nikolay had never set foot aboard a boat but Voin's evocative letters home from the Far East, where he was stationed in the Imperial Russian Navy, proved more than sufficient. In 1856, he enrolled as a naval cadet and completed six years of training. Barely a year into his studies at the naval academy, the young Nikolay saw his first opera. Soon he heard symphonies by Beethoven and Mendelssohn and encountered a piece by his senior Mikhail Glinka, Jota Aragonesa. Even before he embarked on a three-year voyage around the world aboard a clipper, Rimsky knew he wanted to be a composer, not a seaman.

You'd get differing answers to the question of whether John Adams is America's greatest living composer, but he's the one to whom the country turned in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The demand for new work from him has only increased since he achieved senior citizen status. Fortunately, he's been able to meet that demand with distinctive large-scale works. Consider 2016's Scheherazade.2, recorded here by the violinist who premiered the work, Leila Josefowicz, with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra under David Robertson. The piece succeeds on several levels. It is, outwardly, as close as Adams has come to writing a big Romantic violin concerto, and it will no doubt be welcomed into the concert repertory as such. Yet go into it more deeply, and it seems less a concerto than – well, what, exactly? Adams calls it a "dramatic symphony." English critic Nick Breckenfield has compared it to Berlioz's Harold in Italy, with the soloist representing an individual making her way through a series of adventures that may have a threatening tinge.

Owing in large part to their exotic inspiration, Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade and Aram Khachaturian's Gayane are among the most beautiful and most frequently performed Russian and Soviet works of music. The creator of Sheherazade, who as a young navy officer travelled the oceans, was enchanted by the Oriental collection of stories and folk tales The One Thousand and One Nights.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) is an American orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts. It is one of the five major American symphony orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five". Founded in 1881, the BSO plays most of its concerts at Boston's Symphony Hall and in the summer performs at Tanglewood. Andris Nelsons is the current music director of the BSO. Bernard Haitink currently holds the title of conductor emeritus of the BSO, and Seiji Ozawa has the title of BSO music director laureate.