Most Russian composers of the decades before the First World War produced songs almost as a matter of course; most of them were pupils of either Tchaikovsky or Rimsky-Korsakov, and inherited from them a facility with the elegant romance, a style that was French-influenced but that had been an element in Russian song ever since Glinka. Glazunov was no exception. This useful record brings together his songs, many of them (inevitably) settings of Pushkin. These are among the best of them, and they can possess great charm and fluency, though they lack the distinctiveness of the Pushkin settings of Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov. There are the expected genre pieces, with strumming Spanish guitars, lulling Venetian barcarolles, mock-Oriental melismata and so on. Glazunov handles it all with an amiable expertise that never fails and that never goes very far either. His piano parts are always effectively written, and Christopher Cox does well with them.
The vocal writing is seldom much beyond the powers of the drawing-room skilled amateur at whom such songs were really directed, though naturally they benefit from the professional attentions of Christopher Keyte and Margaret Cable (who sing them, ambitiously, in Russian). The recording is a little noisy, and on my pressing marked by that now obsolete (or at least obsolescent) fault, pre-echo.'