Apparently you can go home again, as two new CD releases on sale tomorrow from classical music’s megasuperstars explore the repertoire of their native lands.

Anna Netrebko started at the Kirov Opera and has deep roots there. On “Russian Album,” accompanied by the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre and its ubiquitous director Valery Gergiev, she offers a tantalizing peek at the mature works of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mikhail Glinka, and Sergei Rachmaninoff, all of which are standard fare in St. Petersburg but virtually unknown in the West.

While this album is a beautiful experience with some stunning moments, Ms. Netrebko’s voice does not translate as well as some others to CD. Her voice contains a certain electricity that only crackles during live performance and instantaneously captures her audience. When recorded, she sounds above average but not exceptional. Listening to Ms. Netrebko on CD evokes conductor Sergiu Celibidache who pronounced the recorded experience as “exciting as looking at a picture of Brigette Bardot.”

Still, Ms. Netrebko makes a strong case for this neglected repertoire. The scene from Act IV of Rimsky’s The Tsar’s Bride is sublime, the beginning and ending arias from his The Snow Maiden colorful and harmonically daring. This release would be valuable even if it were only a tool for proselytizing.

The album is designed with the pop arena in mind, and it is already on the top 10 charts in Germany. All of the music is romantic, not as in a particular period of music but rather as an all-pervasive mood. There are just enough songs by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff interspersed to make a complete listening more palatable to the neophyte. There is also at least one familiar track for Western opera lovers, the letter scene from Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.”

The best excerpt is from scene four of Prokofiev’s War and Peace, which Ms. Netrebko has been singing for more than a decade now. Here that je ne sais quoi of radiant color comes through almost as if we were hearing her in the opera house. The ingénue hopefulness in her voice is the perfect contrast to the sardonic waltzes of Prokofiev underneath. As Anna Netrebko — and Maestro Gergiev — spend more and more time at the Metropolitan Opera House, let’s look forward to hearing these masterpieces live in the near future.

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Americans think the market for music revolves around them, but in the classical world the number of downloads for individual performances is overwhelmingly centered in East Asia, particularly China. In 2005, the no.1 artist in Chinese musical history, pianist Lang Lang, toured of some his country’s biggest arenas, showcasing repertoire that combines an ancient Asian sensibility with modern Western harmonic technique. The resultant CD, “Dragon Songs,” is a rather esoteric choice for most listeners, but not without merit.

Sadly, the disc is dominated by a now mercifully outdated piece called the Yellow River Piano Concerto. Exposing the capriciousness of absolute power, Jiang Qing (Mrs. Mao) commissioned a major work for piano and orchestra just a few years before she sent the Red Guard into the streets to smash the hands of classical pianists. This shameless piece of propaganda was composed by a committee of writers, and sounds like it. It features two Communist anthems — the Internationale and The East Is Red, best left unheard.

The remainder of the program is more interesting. Much has been made of the East Asian influence on Claude Debussy, but little has been written about the reverse phenomenon. Mr. Lang performs these individual short mood pieces as encores at his recitals, so they are somewhat familiar to his Western fans. Especially impressive is his delicate touch in such little gems as Autumn Moon on a Calm Lake and Spring Wind.

Elsewhere we get a sense of Lang Lang the accompanist, as he pairs with the pipa (lute), guanzi (double reed pipe that sounds like a soprano saxophone) and zither. These are his roots, as his father and grandfather were traditional musicians. Interestingly, the Dance from Qiuci could have been written by Mahler and has a decided Sephardic Jewish flavor.

What is inescapable about Dragon Songs is what the program booklet calls Mao’s enforced “obligatory cheerfulness.” It recalls the bad old days out East and that famous toast of Dmitri Shostakovich, “Let’s drink to life not getting any better!”