Carlo Maria Giulini was born in Barletta, Southern Italy in May 1914 with what appears to have been an instinctive love of music. As the town band rehearsed he could be seen peering through the ironwork of the balcony of his parents’ home, immovable and intent. The itinerant fiddlers who roamed the countryside during the lean years of the First World War also caught his ear. In 1919, the family moved to the South Tyrol, where the five-year-old Carlo asked his parents for "one of those things the street musicians play". Signor Giulini acquired a three-quarter size violin, setting in train a process which would take his son from private lessons with a kindly nun to violin studies with Remy Principe at Rome’s Academy of St Cecilia at the age of 16.

Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra celebrate Mussorgsky with the release of two of his most cherished works, 'Pictures at an Exhibition' and 'Night on a Bare Mountain' (performed here in Mussorgsky’s original version). Gergiev is at his finest conducting these paragons of Mussorgsky’s work, featured alongside which are the seldom heard 'Songs and Dances of Death', composed during the years 1875 to 1877 and left languishing unpublished during the composer’s lifetime. One of Mussorgsky’s most powerful compositions, each song deals with death in a poetic manner reflecting experiences not uncommon in 19th century Russia: child death, death in youth, drunken misadventure and war.