This recording presents an orchestration of Sviridov’s song-cycle on verses by Yesenin, Russia Cast Adrift (which Hvorostovsky has already recorded in its piano version – Philips, 8/96 – nla), in a remarkable arrangement made by Evgeny Stetsyuk for orchestra and Russian folk instruments. It is remarkable because it brings out all the colour inherent in the piano original – think of the ‘symphonic dimension’ of the piano accompaniments of Mussorgsky or Shostakovich – without sacrificing anything of Sviridov’s fluid style. Maya Pritsker, in her notes, observes that the ‘new orchestration also dramatically magnifies both the epic scope and profound philosophical meaning of the work’, and points out that this is conveyed in the composer’s description of it as a ‘vocal poem’.

It is a perfect vehicle for Hvorostovsky’s voice, enabling him to exploit its power and resonance to the full, for example, in the third song, ‘Open before me, O my guardian angel’, though some of the most memorable moments are more intimate and reflective, as in the fourth, ‘Silver Path’, and the sixth, ‘Simon, Peter …’, in which the singer beautifully displays his silvery high register. The orchestration paradoxically brings out the intimacy of a number of the settings (the fourth, again) merely ‘sketched in’, so to speak, in the piano original, and also naturally amplifies the blackness that also surfaces not infrequently – the whirling textures of the astral vision that is the eighth song, ‘Beyond the hills of the Milky Way’, are a particularly impressive example of this, making the fearful darkness and foreboding very much present. The extra track, ‘The Virgin in the City’ from another work by Sviridov, Petersburg, a Vocal Poem, is particularly moving.

Both performance and recording (made at the Radio House in St Petersburg) are surely everything the composer would have wanted.