condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light wear) + Rare folded poster included.

In 1979, Vyacheslav Artyomov (b. 1940) was blacklisted as one of "Khrennikov's Seven" at the Sixth Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers - named, denounced, and effectively banned from performance, publication, and earnings within the USSR for unauthorized participation in festivals of Soviet music in the West. The echo of the 1948 Congress, at which Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Myaskovsky had been victimized, was not lost on those who heard the denunciation. Artyomov had been working since 1975 in the improvisation group Astreya alongside Sofia Gubaidulina and Viktor Suslin, a trio whose exploration of ancient and non-Western instruments placed them firmly outside the sanctioned musical culture of the period. Nine years after his blacklisting, Khrennikov - the same chief of the Union bureaucracy who had banned him - attended the premiere of Artyomov's Requiem and changed his position entirely: "Artyomov is an outstanding composer."

In Memoriam (1968, revised 1984) is the opening movement of the cycle The Star of Exodus, conceived as a trilogy of symphonies with soloists. It is scored for orchestra with violin solo - a work of sustained mourning and measured intensity, the violin moving through a sound-world that draws on Orthodox chant, archaic melodic structures, and Artyomov's characteristic wide-interval melodic lines. Where Gubaidulina's music generates tension from the collision of heterogeneous elements, Artyomov's tends toward a more continuous and concentrated devotional sound, the spirituality less contested and more sustained. Rostropovich, who commissioned and premiered three of Artyomov's symphonies, described him as bringing "glory to our country and to Russian art." This original Russian Disc LP represents one of the first official domestic releases of his work.