Charles Munch was one of the best known representatives of romantic conducting school. As a young man, he proved to be a gifted violinist and worked as a concertmaster with orchestras in Germany led by some of the country’s best conductors, such as Hermann Abendroth, Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler. He started his own conducting career in Paris where Munch directed some of the famous orchestras of the French capital from the mid 1930s. In 1962, after thirteen years with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the USA, the conductor returned to France and visited Moscow for the second time, in May 1965.

Working with outstanding western conductors was a rare opportunity for the Soviet orchestra members. The collaboration between the musicians of the USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra and Charles Munch was even more symbolic as it coincided with a new, truly golden period in the orchestra’s history – Evgeny Svetlanov became its chief conductor just before Munch’s arrival.

A splendid feeling of the orchestral palette and ability to render the finest details of the orchestral score made Munch an outstanding interpreter of French music of different centuries – from Rameau to Honegger. This album features recordings of fragments from Rameau’s opera Dardanus, Debussy’s La mer, the second suite from Roussel’s ballet Bacchus et Ariane, and Honegger’s Symphony No.2, the tragic war spirit of which proved to be so close and understandable to the Moscow audience.

The recordings were made at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in 1965.