New York Philharmonic; Dimitri Mitropoulos - Sergej Prokofiev: Romeo und Julia; Arnold Schonberg: Verklarte Nacht; Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

As individual as the three composers united here were in their work, they are also, in their continuation of the classical-romantic tradition and their combination with new means of expression, typical representatives of those generations who were involved in the departure of music into the 20th century and what was soon to be called modernism. Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) had already used a thoroughly progressive musical language and adopted various aesthetic approaches during almost two decades spent in several European countries and the USA, before he finally returned to what was then the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s - not least out of homesickness - and attempted to find a viable middle way between the demands of cultural policy there (socialist realism was also to reflect the supposed achievements of the communist power structure in the arts) and his own individual personal musical language.