This latest release in the increasingly important series of Guild CDs devoted to the art of the great conductor Leopold Stokowski combines music by Russian masters of succeeding generations and a unique recording of music by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was a fellow-pupil of Stokowski at London's Royal College of Music in the 1890s. The three performances are all live recordings, and the Tchaikovsky Overture and Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, both with the London Symphony Orchestra have to be counted amongst the greatest and most impressive performances of these masterpieces ever captured through the medium of recording. The Vaughan Williams work for harp and strings was first performed in New York in 1939 and this is the only available recording of a Stokowski performance of this great work.