Most of the songs in this recital belong to the genre of domestic music-making, often at a high level of skill and appreciation, which was turned largely by Glinka into a major Russian tradition. Lina Mkrtchian, with her perceptive pianist, Evgeny Talisman, has the manner well within her understanding, especially in the songs that are simple in style and direct in emotion. One such is the Cradle Song, which she sings warmly and lullingly, with a flowing line, and she does nicely with the no less popular The Lark. On the whole she is most successful with the more melancholy pieces, among them the Kukolnik setting, Doubt, and the Zhukovsky setting, Consolation. The latter is actually a translation from Uhland, though the booklet does not acknowledge the fact, nor does it identify Alas, if but earlier I had known as an arrangement of a gipsy song; I cannot discover anything about O Lyre.
However, even in these songs there is a real problem with the singer’s clarity of enunciation. Matters are still more obscure in the powerfully dramatic The Night Review, an obvious forerunner of Mussorgsky’s “The field-marshal” from his Songs and Dances of Death, where it really is essential for the singer to be able to curl the voice around the actual sounds of Zhukovsky’s grim narrative (even for non-Russian speakers this is a part of the effect). The rapid patter of Travelling Song vanishes into a blur. This is a real weakness in a recital that helps to draw attention to Glinka’s value as a song writer.'