Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s naturally warm voice might not seem well suited to the grim sequence of Mussorgsky’s four songs but he finds a skilful expressive range for them. His gentlest tones make a sardonic lullaby for the mother crooning over the dying child in ‘Lullaby’, with an eerie portamento in the repeated ‘Bayu, bayu’ that finally slides into oblivion. He roughens his voice a little for the serenade to the mortally sick girl, turning to a cry of triumph at the end. The drunken peasant’s lurch into his final stupor is almost sad, with an ironic tenderness that is banished when in the last song Field Marshal Death comes to review his fallen troops. There is an open snarl at the word ‘smert’ (‘death’) and a terrfying curl of the lip in the voice at ‘ulybnulas’ (‘smiles’) as he surveys the corpses before launching into the final, bitter merriment over the dead. This is a subtler performance, in some ways a more deliberately and ironically lyrical one, than many who seek out the more extreme operatic resonances of the song; but it is a distinguished one.

Temirkanov accompanies Hvorostovsky intelligently and gives a powerful, vivid account of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. It is full of subtle touches: the almost sorrowing quotation from the First Symphony, whose failure had so anguished Rachmaninov, and in the second dance an almost bitter vitality that suggests awareness of the dark conclusion to Ravel’s La valse. The final dance, not easy music to control, is brilliantly handled, its contrasts of fatalism and assertion, of the ‘Dies irae’ that had so obsessed him and triumphant chants, combining in some of the most original music Rachmaninov ever wrote. He wrote them in 1940, and was 70 when he died in 1943, but it is difficult not to feel that he still had much music in him.