Album Notes

...Premières is a highly stimulating collection of rarely heard works for guitar and strings, beautifully played and recorded.

The playing of the Seasons orchestra is excellent - sonorous and rich - and Dimitri Illarionov is a fiery soloist.

American Record Guide

The four works on the CD are well chosen: music varied in style and content, consistently interesting, and above all music that goes somewhere.

...The Moscow based Seasons orchestra is vibrant and dynamic, able to enhance the guitar’s colors with some striking hues of its own. ... a chamber orchestra capable of an unusually wide range of expression. Listen to the second movement of Hétu’s concerto and you will know what I mean: power and tone colour with musical purpose. This is one of the most beautiful slow movements I can remember in a guitar concerto since that of the Aranjuez.

Dimitri Illarionov and anyone else involved in the venture are to be congratulated.

Colin Cooper, Classical Guitar Magazine

Born 1979 in Moscow, Dimitri Illarionov is one of the most brilliant classical guitarists of his country. He has been the laureate of numerous international competitions among those the prestigious Guitar Foundation of America Competition in Miami in 2002. He now gives concerts all over the world as a recitalist, as a soloist with orchestra as well as with the gifted Russian cellist Boris Andrianov.