This album pairs Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite Scheherazade with The Enchanted Lake, a short work by his student Anatol Liadov. In 1887–88, following the sudden death of his brilliant friend Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov composed three orchestral works which crowned his Russian national period and went on to make his name a permanent part of the worldwide concert repertoire: Capriccio espagnol; the symphonic suite Scheherazade; and the concert overture La Grande Pâque Russe. With Scheherazade Rimsky-Korsakov did not tell a story, but instead set individual, unconnected episodes and images to music, beautifully tracing the psychological development of the outline story. At the conclusion, we hear the Sultan's angular theme, with which the first movement began, fading and merging with the solo violin representing the character of Scheherazade.

Anatol Liadov may have had a reputation for being lazy (based solely on Rimsky-Korsakov’s opinion of him) yet his ambition was for every piece of music he created to be flawless. One consequence of this was that his oeuvre consists entirely of miniatures. The Enchanted Lake does not tell a story, but is purely impressionistic music that describes a Russian forest lake and is worthy of comparison with Ravel and Debussy.

Dmitri Kitayenko directed various orchestras in Moscow before becoming chief conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic in 1976 and subsequently conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of the Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt am Main, from 1990 to 1996. He went on to hold principal positions with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bern Symphony Orchestra, the KBS Symphony Orchestra in Seoul and finally, in addition to his worldwide activities as a guest conductor, was appointed honorary conductor of the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne.