Despite his Russian name, Igor Buketoff's biographical and musical pedigrees are thoroughly American -- he born in Connecticut and educated at the University of Kansas, Juilliard, and the Los Angeles Conservatory. He won the first Alice M. Ditson Award for Young Conductors in 1942, and conducted opera and concerts in New York and Indiana in the early 1940s. Until 1964, when he spent a season with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, most of his conducting engagements, including those at the New York Philharmonic Orchestra's Young People's Concerts (1948-53), were in the U.S. Since the 1950s, however, he has been an internationally based music educator, and his notable conducting engagements have included the first performance of Rachmaninov's unfinished opera Mona Vanna. He has maintained a long relationship with the Philadelphia Orchestra. As a recording artist, his repertory has ranged from late Classical to contemporary, although his most enduring release is his recording, for RCA, of his own arrangement (really almost a recomposition) of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, recorded with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Buketoff reconstructed the work, restoring for voice the choral hymns that Tchaikovsky used as his sources for the piece. The result was a dazzling expansion of this Russian Romantic warhorse.