"Dmitry Shostakovich wrote regularly to his close friend Isaak Glikman during their forty-year relationship from the early 1930s to the composer's death in 1975. The core of Story of a Friendship is a collection of 288 of these letters starting in 1941, when both correspondents became wartime evacuees from their home town of Leningrad. Earlier letters were destroyed during the siege of the city; however, the chronological gap is bridged by Glikman's...

Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov is one of Russia's great musical figures. Although largely self-taught, he became a professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and one of the famed “Mighty Handful” of Russian nationalist composers. Works like Scheherazade and Capriccio Espagnol remain popular, as does his textbook on orchestration. His influence extended from students like Stravinsky and Prokofiev to non-Russian composers such as Debussy, Dukas, and...