Alex Renwick:

>Have we no people on the list who started with Russian composers.

Absolutely.  When I was about four years old my father played Tchaikovsky's
Little Russian Symphony, Borodin's Second Symphony, and Prokofief's
Classical Symphony, not to mention Peter and the Wolf, on 78rpm records,
(Ormandy, Mitropoulos and Rodzinsky, I believe) and I have loved these
works ever since (well over half a century.) The first time I went to a
live concert, at 14, the program was The Firebird Suite, Scherazade, and
Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto.  Among the first recordings I ever
owned, within a year of that, were Swan Lake and Gayne.

Jim Tobin