Modest Mussorgsky was a man of great friendships and great loyalties. When his friend the Russian painter Victor Hartman died in 1873 of a heart ailment at the age of thirty-nine, Mussorgsky's grief knew no limits. Hartman's drawings and pastels, all in a style très russe, were exhibited in a St. Petersburg gallery shortly after his death, and Mussorgsky decided to pay a musical tribute to his friend by writing a suite for piano, setting to music selected paintings from Hartman's exhibition. This suite, published under the tide Pictures at an Exhibition, became very popular, and acquired an even greater popularity through Maurice Ravel's dazzling orchestration.

The steady increase in recordings of his music has now established Suk as one of the great musical poets of the early 20th century. Too much is made of his affinities with his teacher and father-in-law, Dvorák; for his own part, Dvorák never imposed his personality on his pupils and Suk's mature music owes him little more than a respect for craft and an extraordinarily well developed ear for orchestral colour. His affinities in the five-movement A Summer's Tale, completed in 1909 – a magnificent successor to his profound Asrael Symphony – reflect Debussy and parallel the music of his friend Sibelius and Holst, but underpinning the musical language is a profound originality energising both form and timbre. Mackerras's recording joins a select band: Šejna's vintage performance on Supraphon and Pešek's inspired rendition with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic; his is an equal to them both and the Czech Philharmonic's playing is both aspiring and inspiring. While their reading is suffused with a feeling for the work's myriad orchestral colours, they recognise that Suk's music is much more than atmosphere. In particular they excel in their handling of the drama and overwhelming emotional urgency of this remarkable, big-boned symphonic poem.

Conductor Sir Charles Mackerras has always been a champion of the music of Arthur Sullivan. In the early '90's, he began to record the Gilbert & Sullivan operettas with Telarc. Like the Sargent recordings of the '50's, Mackerras uses mostly opera singers–veterans of Covent Garden and of the English and Welsh National Operas but he secured the services of two veteran Savoyards, Richard Suart and the late Donald Adams. Mackerras planned to record at least seven of the Savoy operas, perhaps more, but was forced to suspend the series due to lack of funding as I understand. This fine recording of The Mikado, fortunately, was one of the four he was able to complete.