A Tear-Drop (orchestrated by Hans Kindler)

Une Larme (A Tear-Drop), written in 1880, was one of the last piano pieces Mussorgsky wrote and is a kind of lament which might have come from the pen of Tchaikovsky. We hear it in a charming orchestration by Hans Kindler, who recorded it in 1948 on a 78 rpm disc with the title Song of Russia and published it the following year as Chanson Russe. Kindler was born in 1892 and began his musical career in his native Holland before emigrating to America where he became first cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski from 1914-21. Ten years later he founded the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington D.C. and was its conductor until November 1948, a few months before his death at the age of 57.