This first volume of the Naxos Igor Markevitch Complete Orchestral Works Edition, to be followed by the seven volumes previously released on Marco Polo, brings together two relatively early compositions of astonishing technical and æsthetic assurance.

The Partita is in effect already his second Piano Concerto, written when the composer was twenty. The granitic oratorio Paradise Lost, whose première the composer himself conducted at the BBC in London barely three years later, is among the most important of the composer’s works, bearing comparison with Stravinsky’s contemporaneous OEdipus Rex and Perséphone, yet of striking individuality of vision.