An equivocal figure in Russian music of the Soviet era, Dmitry Borisovich Kabalevsky was born in St Petersburg on 30th December 1904. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with both Nicolay Myaskovsky and Alexander Goldenweiser, graduating in composition (1929) then piano (1930), and was appointed a senior lecturer in 1932 and a full professor in 1939. Riding out the ideological storm of the 1920s as a member of both the progressive Association of Soviet Musicians and the ‘conservative’ Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, he found his mature style in the following decade, notably through two works which achieved international success: the Second Symphony (1934), championed by conductors such as Arturo Toscanini and Malcolm Sargent, evinces the drama and lyricism that Prokofiev made central to his music on returning to the Soviet Union; the opera Colas Breugnon (1938), base