World Premiere Recordings! On September 21, 1928, Prokofiev wrote to Diaghilev: "I told you about the young Russian composers Shostakovich, Mosolov, and Popov, who stand far above the others due to their talent." Today, only Shostakovich is a household name. But these other two are tremendously intriguing in their own right. Alexander Mosolov (1900-1973) had a brief period of notoriety in the 1920s with a very short and very noisy orchestral piece called The Iron Foundry, but there was a great deal more to him than that bit of juvenile nose-thumbing.