The Russians aren’t coming

AROUND THE TURN of the century, I was approached by a London orchestra with a view to freshening up its repertoire. Having made a study of composers under the Soviet system, I proposed a series titled Other Russia, music of the greatest originality that was unknown for one reason or another outside its homeland. Some of the composers were still absent from major Western reference works.

There was the reclusive Galina Ustvolskaya, a Shostakovich student who rejected his attentions and refused to leave home for years; the Moscow mystic Alemdar Karamanov whose life changed one morning when he heard Jesus