I became interested in
Amirov after encountering his darkly exotic "symphonic mugam"
Gulistan Bayaty Shiraz on an Arte Nova disc (which also included Terterian's amazing 3rd symphony). I bought the Naxos CD of mugams conducted by Yablonsky - sadly, although it's well-played and recorded, on direct comparison of performances of
Gyulistan Bayati Shiraz (as it's called by Naxos) Yablonsky comes up short, tending to speed where he should wallow (pretty much everywhere). His
Shur is about 20 minutes long, whereas the two previous recordings are reportedly about 30 minutes each.
I've also encountered Amirov's symphony for strings "To the Memory of Nisami", hidden away on a Naxos disc called
Caucasian Impressions. Together with the orchestrations of folk songs, I think this work is the best thing on the disc. Not as colourful as the mugams, it reminds me favourably of Shostakovich's string quartets - which is a neat trick considering Amirov wrote it in 1941, at which time Shost had only written his first one (1938).
I've resisted the Naxos disc with the piano concerto so far, as it's the only Amirov work on that CD, and only 25 minutes long.
Other than these Naxos releases, there's practically nothing of Amirov's work available on CD apart from one OOP ASV disc (probably my next purchases), some very expensive old Olympia releases, and short entries in various chamber flute compilations (not my thing). This is a shame, as from the little I've heard Amirov is one of the great Soviet nationalist composers, possibly placing well ahead of Khachaturian. I wish the Naxos recordings were better, so that they could encourage greater interest - sometimes "adequate" recordings have a worse effect on obscure composers' reputations than no recording at all.
Sadly, the site bearing his name lists only a few of his compositions (which I believe number in the dozens), but does host some MP3s.
http://www.fikretamirov.com/ (Google translation from Azerbaijani)
There is more info on the works here (
http://home.wanadoo.nl/ovar/amirov.htm ), but even this I suspect is incomplete.
Arte Nova misspell his name as "Amirow".

(Note, it's Arabian Nights, not "Egyptian Nights"!)