Piano music by Aram Il’yich Khachaturian (1903-1978), ‘mouthpiece of the entire Soviet Orient’.

Aram Il’yich Khachaturian once described how he “grew up in an atmosphere rich in folk music, popular festivals, rites joyous and sad, events in the lives of people always accompanied by music… deeply engraved in my memory, that determined my musical thinking.” He remains the most renowned of 20th-century Armenian composers, whose unmistakable style came with an urge to invent new forms that reconciled Western practice with Eastern idiom. Raymond Bisha introduces a new album of his piano works performed by Maltese pianist Charlene Farrugia. Her programme comprises Khachaturian’s 2 Children’s Albums and the 7 Recitatives and Fugues.