Portland, Ore.

By the time the Soviet composer Maximilian Steinberg completed his "Passion Week" in 1923, he knew he'd probably never hear it. Having supplanted his conservatory classmate Igor Stravinsky as the star pupil of Russia's greatest composer, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Steinberg was already a prominent musician by the time the revolution brought the Communists to power in 1917. But since the Lithuanian-born composer, who'd converted to Orthodox Christianity from Judaism, had begun setting hymns for Orthodox...