The music of is an increasingly common presence in recording catalogs, and this new release from the and conductor makes as good a place as any to start with this fascinating composer, who was befriended and admired by and suffered many of the same threats from the Soviet musical bureaucracy. 's , is subtitled and has the right to sound like the older master. However, even here, there is a feeling of expanding on , not simply aping him. The work somewhat resembles the grim but wry , of . The is the longest of 's 22 symphonies, clocking in at 55 minutes plus, and though it makes use of material that resembles music by , it uses that material in new ways. Sample the finale, a masterpiece of -like ambivalence, and check out the spectral marimba material. Even more distinctive is the substantial symphonic poem , composed in 1957 for the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. At this point, hadn't written a tone poem of this kind, and there are later works in which he seems to follow his mentee in writing music acceptable to the censors but not producing bombastic socialist-realist celebrations. is not a highly subjective conductor of Russian music, but he does well in the complex textures and difficult long arcs of this music, and ' MediaCity sound is ideal and idiomatic. Every new recording rewrites the canon a bit, and listeners can experience the process here. This release made classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2023. ~ James Manheim