Khachaturian was to Armenian folk music what Gershwin was to jazz; he created tapestries of popular melodies with Lisztian virtuosity and luscious orchestral writing. Born in 1903, the son of a bookbinder, the composer grew up in Tiflis, a cultural melting pot of ethnic street instrumentalists and singers complemented by an opera house regularly visited by such leading Russian artists as Rachmaninov and the bass singer Chaliapin. This formed Khachaturian’s omnivorous musical style, which was further nurtured by his musical studies in Moscow where he was encouraged to cultivate his Caucasian heritage. His spicy and soulful Piano Concerto (1936) and the vibrant dances from his ballet Gayaneh (1941–42), including the “Sabre Dance,” became valuable cultural exports of the Soviet Union. He also embraced the Russian classical tradition of Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, creating the haunting, doom-laden waltz for the 19th-century stage drama Masquerade (1941). In 1948, he suffered official denunciation by Stalinist cultural authorities alongside Prokofiev and Shostakovich (likely for political rather than aesthetic reasons), yet restored his reputation with the ballet Spartacus (1954), which includes the richly expressive “Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia.” In the final decades before his death in 1978, Khachaturian enjoyed success conducting his own music in concert halls and studios around the world, recording what he considered one of his finest works—the dramatic, WWII-inspired Symphony No. 2 (1943)—with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1962.