Perhaps we owe the existence of this music to the chance meeting of young Bax with a Russian woman named Lyuba in 1910. Smitten with Lyuba, the independently wealthy composer followed her across Europe into Russia and Ukraine. He gave up the chase, and consoled himself by getting to know Russian and Ukrainian music and developed a great interest in Russian ballet. In 1919 Diaghilev asked Bax to compose some short orchestral numbers to use between ballets. Bax turned to some piano music he had written in 1912, 1913, and 1915, proposed them as the basis for his "symphonic interludes," and set to work on the orchestrations. In 1919 Ernest Ansermet conducted two of them in two separate concerts, but there is no record of a contemporary performance of the third, nor is there any known manuscript of Bax's orchestration if, indeed, he ever completed one. Bax expert Graham Parlett accomplished its orchestration to finally achieve the three-movement Russian Suite that Bax planned.

The first movement, "Gopak" (National Dance) uses a 1913 piano piece of the same name published as one of Two Russian Tone Pictures. Bax's begins and ends the expected vigorous, rather stomping, dance with bright orchestration and invigorating liveliness. The surprise is the extended central section of the movement, which is very lush, with a sweeping and sensuous violin theme. It is refined, rather Impressionistic in orchestral sound, but not so much in harmonic usage, and has rhythms that surprisingly suggest a tango.

The other of the Two Russian Tone Pictures is the one that was supposed to be the middle movement of the Suite. "Nocturne (May Night in the Ukraine)" was composed in 1912. Parlett modeled his orchestration of the piano piece on other slow, nocturnal Bax pieces that take up the Russian nationalist style, particularly the Evening Piece, and used smaller forces than the rest, restricting the brass to a single pair of horns. The music is warm and very pretty.

The lively finale, "In a Vodka Shop," is an arrangement of a piano piece Bax wrote for Myra Hess in 1915. A light-stepping tune gets a series of different orchestral treatments. It is the conviviality of the shop, and perhaps a series of quick portraits of the customers, rather than drunkenness, that is the subject of this enjoyable movement.

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