× As Russia marched towards revolution, her music was likewise headed for radical change. The Romantic spirit of Tchaikovsky—nowhere in greater evidence than in his magnificent Serenade for Strings—found its torchbearer a generation later in Sergei Rachmaninov. Meanwhile, Rachmaninov's boyhood schoolmate Aleksandr Scriabin developed a bold new language of his own, as audacious as it was fiercely expressive. Disc 1 follows the course of Russian music at the turn of the twentieth century, from Romanticism vers la flamme ("towards the flame").