With a half-Tchaikovsky, half-Rachmaninov programme, a Russian singer with an Anglo-friendly voice plus an even better pianist, this set is a good place to start for those who have been long interested in exploring the song output by these well-known composers but are intimidated by complete anthologies or single discs that lack English notes and translations.

Lyubov Petrova has a cleanly produced voice with a wonderful legato, fine instincts for expressive phrase shaping and ample tone for shading the music that never grows unwieldy in some of Tchaikovsky’s more modest creations. It’s a young voice and a young sensibility. Her ‘Cradle Song’ hasn’t the underlying melancholy of Ljuba Kazarnovkaya (Naxos, 1999) or the dramatic narrative of Christianne Stotjin (Onyx, 3/09). But Petrova’s elegant vocalisation gives a good sense of any given song’s overall shape, even with a bit of conversational lingering in songs such as ‘Wait’. Occasionally she goes a bit far into the operatic zone and over-sings the microphone, which seems inappropriate with music that has one foot in the parlour and expresses fairly basic emotions. Vladimir Feltsman is a good counterbalance: he favours such a dampened piano tone you’d swear he was playing a period instrument.

Rachmaninov’s songs are more in the realm of concert music, if only because the writing often requires a pianist of Feltsman’s calibre – ‘These summer nights’ and ‘Spring Waters’, for example. The composer’s own playing is clearly a model in Feltsman’s straight but never unyielding tempos, in contrast to the more Chopin-esque approach of Vladimir Ashkenazy on the complete Rachmaninov song set with Elisabeth Söderström (Decca). In vocal comparisons, Söderström wins out for her richness of detail with a linguistic authority that perhaps Petrova, a native Russian speaker, takes for granted. Yet Petrova’s soft singing is a marvel. And the more sophisticated Rachmaninov’s poems – ‘The Muse’, for one – the more deeply committed she is. When she sings of ‘magic stillness’ in ‘A Dream’, you hear it in her voice.