The intensity with which the Russian composer Herman Galynin (1922-1966) lived his short life is reflected in the extraordinarily high voltage of his music. In spite of a difficult start in life he was an orphan his instinctive musicality combined with the impulsiveness of his personality to make him one of the best known of Soviet composers while he was a student. Although mental illness put an early end to his meteoric career, the wild, freewheeling energy of his compositions as witness these five works for strings leave little doubt that Galynin would have been one of the major musical voices of the second half of the twentieth century; as it is, what he did achieve is remarkable.