× The final disc of the 2018 edition of Music@Menlo LIVE begins with the unfinished Octet by Mily Balakirev, the leader of the Russian vanguard of composers in St. Petersburg known as the Mighty Handful. Following Anton Arensky’s passionately romantic Opus 35 Cello Quartet, the disc concludes with the hyper–Expressionist Verklärte Nacht—a programmatic work of immense beauty that preceded the twelve–note and serialist techniques established by the iconoclast Arnold Schoenberg, who sought to “ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years” with his compositional developments.