Elena Firsova declares her settings of Osip Mandelstam to be her most important works, and this selection of three of her seven cantatas, composed between 1984 and 1994, bears her out. Most of the texts take the form of highly concentrated, private, anguished meditations, something like extended haikus, and Firsova’s free-flowing, emancipated musical language fits them like a glove. Her harmony commutes between shades of atonality and (especially in Before the Thunderstorm) tonality, and her instrumental writing, derived ultimately from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, has affinities with her one-time teacher Edison Denisov but also with the likes of György Kurtág or, to take a Russian example from the previous generation, Alexander Lokshin.

The performances by the Studio for New Music – formed in 1993 mainly from graduate students at the Moscow Conservatoire – are dedicated and beautifully sustained. The same goes for Ekaterina Kichigina’s singing, although there is no disguising the fact that she has difficulty negotiating some of the high-register writing. Recording quality is warm and atmospheric, and texts are supplied in Cyrillic and English translation.