Kara Karayev

Soviet Azberjani composer Kara Karayev gained wide popularity in the late 1940s and 1950s for ballet and orchestral scores essentially in the late Romantic tradition, with a sprinkling of ethnic color from Azerbaijan and elsewhere. Although he arguably benefited when Shostakovich ran afoul of Soviet authorities, Karayev was admired by the older composer. His music reveals an unusual mastery of orchestration. By the time of his death in 1982, Karayev's music had been mostly forgotten outside the Soviet Union, and for some time, performances of his music remained rare. The situation changed in the 2000s with the emigration of conductors from the former Eastern Bloc to Western countries, with ensembles hungry for unfamiliar but crowd-pleasing orchestral music. ~ James Manheim