Although not as well-known as Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Dmitri Kabalevsky is one of Russia’s highly gifted composers. His style is in the Tchakiovskian idiom with appropriate modern trimmings - which is another way of saying that his music has great and immediate appeal for the average listener. Overture to Colas Breugnon is a brisk, brilliant, and high-spirited piece, written as the curtain raiser of Kabalevsky’s opera based on Roman Rolland’s lusty novel of life in Burgundy, France, during the 16th century. The hero of the story has something in him of both Robin Hood and Francois Villon (a French lyric poet who was banished from Paris in 1463), and Kabalevsky has written music admirably fitting this character.