Grigori Frid‘s monodrama The Diary of Anne Frank (1968) put him on the musical map and extended his reputation beyond Soviet Russia. Born in 1915 in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), Frid witnessed early on how his family fell victim to the seemingly indiscriminate (and deliberately arbitrary) rounds of suppression, arrests and deportations inflicted by the Stalin Regime. Aesthetically his output reflects the music of Dmitri Shostakovich on the one hand, and that of his younger contemporaries Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke on the other. We can hear how he was influenced by the great Russian tradition, but was also yearning to find contemporary ways of expressing himself, more in line with international trends in music. The programme includes the world premiere recordings of Frid’s Phädra and Piano Quintet Op. 72.