Igor Markevitch was hailed by Bartók in 1933 as the most striking personality in contemporary music. The monumental, searching Le Novel Âge anticipates stylistic features that will surface in the music of Prokofiev fifteen years later, while Sinfonielta is the seminal work that so impressed Dyagilcv when the composer was sixteen, and Cinéma-Ouverture was written under the spell of Eisenstein. For decades eclipsed by bis subsequent great success as a conductor, this music offers an essential key to understanding the art of our century.