Paul Juon was born in Moscow, of Swiss parents, in 1872, studying there with Arensky and Taneyev; Rachmaninov, a fellow student, dubbed him 'the Russian Brahms'. At the Hochschule der Musik in Berlin, Woldemar Bargiel, Clara Schumann's half-brother, was his main teacher before Juon himself became a respected member of the staff. There are indeed echoes of Brahms in Juon's early music but there is also a fondness for Russian folksong and a mastery of counterpoint, which all feed into his urgent, late-Romantic lyricism.