Stanislav Kochanovsky began his new post as chief conductor of the NDR Radio Philharmonic in 2024. For his debut album leading the orchestra, he leads a program of music of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian music dear to his heart and training in St. Petersburg. The album’s centerpiece is Tchaikovsky’s Third Orchestral Suite, evocative of the composer’s melancholy Sleeping Beauty ballet and Symphony No. 5 in its opening movements and often excerpted for its last movement “Theme and Variations.” The most familiar work is Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol, a flamboyant display of an orchestra’s palette of colors and timbres. Nikolay Tcherepnin, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, composed the music to Edmond Rostand’s play La Princesse lointaine, the prelude of which is presented as the overture to the program.