Sovietstories

“ David Oistrakh was a good musician, but was working more for the government than for the Conservatoire”

One day last year, Sulamita Aronovsky’s phone rang with an unexpected message. A box of 1958 recordings bearing her name had been found in the Vilnius radio archives, accompanied by an instruction that they should be destroyed. That, she had thought, had been her punishment for defecting from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. ‘And when I listened to those tapes,’ she says, ‘I thought they weren’t so bad.’ That’s typically modest: on the CD now released under the title , her Mozart, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy and