Une larme (A tear-drop), written in 1880, was one of the last piano pieces Musorgsky wrote and is a kind of lament which might have come from the pen of Tchaikovsky. We hear it in a charming orchestration by Hans Kindler, who recorded it in 1941 on a 78rpm disc with the title Song of Russia and published it a few years later as Chanson russe. Kindler was born in 1892 and began his musical career in his native Holland before emigrating to America, where he became first cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski from 1914 to 1921. Ten years later he founded the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC and was its conductor until November 1948, a few months before his death at the age of 57.

from notes by Edward Johnson © 2020