Mikis Theodorakis, who turned 90 last month, earned worldwide fame for the music to the 1964 film Zorba the Greek and remained a poster-boy to the international Left for his unwavering commitment to Communism. Aside from his film music, his song-cycle The Ballad of Mauthausen ranks among the most beautiful music ever written about the Nazi Holocaust. Less familiar are the composer’s classical roots. In 1954, Theodorakis went to Paris to study at the Conservatoire with Olivier Messaien and Eugene Bigot. He stayed for five years, writing a lot of music in a range of Francophone styles. The discoveries on…

In the latter years of the Soviet Union, a composer could be cast out by the system and still sustained by it. Alfred Schnittke, when his symphonies were removed from performance, was given commissions to write music for the film industry by the Composers Union chief Tikhon Krennikov, the very apparatchik who had ordered the ban on his symphonies. Nikolai Kapustin, who wrote disapproved jazz scores, was for much of his career the resident pianist of the main symphony orchestra of Moscow Radio, an ensemble which occasionally agreed to perform his non-socialist works, only to refuse at the last moment. This two-faced…