In The Hanging Gardens of Babylon the internationally acclaimed violinist Maria Milstein will shine in Arutiunian’s grand Violin Concerto. The musically poetic journey in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Marco Polo follows the structure of a promenade, always followed by a caravanserai. During the promenade, with traditional Armenian music, we imagine ourselves in the desert on the back of a camel. The journey starts with the gallant and virtuoso Concerto for strings by the film composer Nino Rota and crosses the sea to Constantinople with the Gondol Şarkısı written by Sultan Abdülaziz in Eurasian style. Fikret Amirov, who grew up with ‘Persian-Arab’ folk music, developed a new genre, the symphonic mugam. His Symphony for string orchestra is dedicated to the great 12th-century Persian poet Nizami. The Silk Road ends in Beijing with Song of the Ch’in, pure Chinese sounds by the living Chinese-American composer Zhou Long.