My hunch is that people will be charitable to the weaknesses, if they even hear them, because they’ll have bought into the myth. By co-incidence, another unknown Soviet composer has recently been dragged into the light. The Armenian pianist Diana Gabrielyan has just released a CD of music by four Russian and Soviet composers, one of whom is her compatriot Arno Babajanyan. Born two years after Weinberg in 1921, Babajanyan is one of those regional Soviet composers who gets a one-line dismissal in the history books as an "official folklorist". It’s true, Babajanyan’s early works are sometimes laced with Armenian idioms, as the CD shows. This went down well with a regime keen to placate nationalist feelings. When the official line towards Western modernism relaxed a little in the Sixties Babajanyan tried that too. Because he wasn’t a dissident hero, our natural reaction is to dismiss him as a cynic or a hypocrite. The music tells a different story. To my ear it's inventive, beautifully crafted, and sometimes strikingly original.