Most music-lovers are aware how the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky met his death at the age of just 42: put bluntly, he drank himself to death. Other composers, however, met a similar fate, and one of these was Gavriil Nikolayevich Popov. The Soviet Composers' Union was never a teetotal organization, but Popov was certainly thirstier than average. His was a tragic case, because he could not come to terms with the spiritual climate of Stalinism. As early as the 1930s he justifiably felt threatened by the Stalinist organization 'Proletkult', and in 1948 he was among the composers who were singled out in the second purification of Soviet composers.

Popov possessed one of the greatest Russian compositional talents of the twentieth century - and, in the decades following the fall of the Soviet Union, his music was rediscovered not only within Russia but around the world.

Alto Records returns to international availability two recordings that first surfaced in the 1990s and drew international attention from the music press: Popov's Second and Fifth Symphonies, conducted by Gennady Provatorov and Gurgen Karapetyan.