The music of Russian composer Alla Pavlova (born in 1952), who lives in New York City, should be appealing to fans of old-fashioned tonality. It would be a stretch to call her music neo-Romantic because there is nothing really neo about the pieces on this CD; she sticks essentially to the harmonic vocabulary and musical syntax of the 19th century, although her modulations are sometimes more adventurous. The emotional content of the music recalls the late Romantic intensity of a composer like Tchaikovsky, and comparisons with him are perhaps inevitable because the two are compatriots and both are best known for their symphonies and full-length narrative ballets. Pavlova's lyrical music even in her symphony has a dancelike regularity and tends to be somewhat rhythmically square.
Patrick Baton leads the Moscow-based Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra in spirited performances of Pavlova's Symphony No. 6 from 2006 and the Suite from her 2007 ballet Thumbelina.