Violinist Julia Smirnova and cellist Konstantin Manaev are a duo not only on the concert stage, but also in their private lives. "We play two instruments and have two temperaments," they say, "we embody yin and yang, as it were. All the works on this release are directly related to our artistic lives and open the doors to our musical world." The duo prefers contemporary music "that touches the audience's feelings." It is music that has a lot of songfulness in it - and it is pieces by composing people who belong not only to the spatial and temporal, but beyond that to the emotional neighborhood of the performers.