Conductor Evgeny Svetlanov (1928–2002) was the unsurpassed authority on Russian Romantic orchestral music in the last decades of the 20th century.
From 1965 until 2000, Svetlanov conducted the USSR State Symphony Orchestra, and recorded an extensive catalogue of Russian music, amassing the largest recorded legacy of any Russian conductor. At one point Svetlanov even claimed to have recorded “absolutely all the Russian symphonic music that has ever been written.”
Svetlanov’s recording of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” was the first studio recording to be made in the Soviet Union by Melodiya, the consolidated state record label, and united Stravinsky’s portrait of pagan Russia with the sound of the modern Russian orchestra in one of the most thrilling and visceral recordings of the work made in the pre-CD era, and a performance that still stands out in an astonishingly crowded field. The recording has been restored by Urlicht AudioVisual, correcting and repairing audible edits, splices, dropouts, and several other anomalies.
