Apart from the language barrier, Prokofiev’s songs present problems because they are so determined to avoid conventional musical versification. Most of his art-songs live on mood and narrative vividness rather than on memorable turns of phrase, which also means that they depend on singers with a fine command of tone-colour and sharp instincts for how to deploy it.

These Claudia Barainsky has without a doubt, as one might expect from one who has made her name above all in the 20th-century operatic repertoire. She moves with equal ease through the Ravelian pastel-shadings of the Akhmatova songs and Songs without words, to the Mussorgsky-like sly humour of The Ugly Duckling, to the more experimental Balmont settings. She knows how to plumb mystical depths and how to glide over deceptively cheerful surfaces. And her Russian is extremely good.

Serious collectors will have, or want, the three-disc Delos set of all Prokofiev’s songs, including his abjectly conformist Socialist Realist ones. That set divides some of the cycles between two or three voices, and although there is very little to choose between Barainsky and her rival Victoria Yevtodieva, she certainly outperforms the dry-voiced tenor Konstantin Pluzhnikov and baritone Andrei Slavny. Her pianist Axel Bauni is fine, but not as acute in timing and colour as Yuri Serov. Recording quality is excellent in both issues. Orfeo offers no Russian texts; Delos includes them but in an unhelpful transliteration and not aligned with the translations.