When Russia was swallowed in communism, musical life was shackled to the state. Some got out, like Sergei Rachmaninoff. Some stayed and suffered, like Dmitri Shostakovich. Some chose to become functionaries of the regime, like Dmitri Kabalevsky (also a composer). But most were neither dissidents nor lackeys, neither collaborators nor saints. Instead, they did what was necessary to fulfill their musical destinies in the trying circumstances of a police state. And in this group were some of the titans of the age, among them the conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky.

Who? The question is pardonable, for Mravinsky is probably the least known of the great conductors. His life had the misfortune to coincide almost exactly with that of the Soviet Union: He was born in 1908; he died in 1988. For 50 of those years, he directed the Leningrad Philharmonic, in the longest association of conductor and orchestra in history. (Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra are in second place, at 42 years.) Mravinsky traveled little in the West, and his recordings were few and obscure. How can we be certain of his greatness?