Boris Tchaikovsky, who was born in 1925 and died in 1996, did not live through easy times in Russia, so perhaps it is not surprising that the most substantial work in this collection is the cycle of eight Pushkin songs centring on the artist’s responsibility to his talent. He has the song-writer’s essential gift of being able to light upon a musical gesture that is flexible to the poem’s shifting imagery or expression, and the best of these songs are moving – none more so than the seventh, about the artist’s ambivalent feelings on completing and so parting from a well loved piece of work. Elsewhere, the emotions are sometimes veiled. Not for nothing was he a student of Shostakovich. His String Trio, written in 1955, has a cool, enigmatic Andante that gradually intensifies into something more mysterious, and for a finale an Allegretto of a kind of nervous playfulness that inevitably recalls his teacher.

There is again a nervous tension in the cycle of settings by Josef Brodsky, sometimes a bleak simplicity that is never merely banal. These are skilful and interesting songs, and they would make their effect better with a soprano of a stronger voice and clearer articulation: she is too often covered by the piano in this recording. The Lermontov settings, written when the composer was only 15, are more traditional; this Tchaikovsky had not yet found his way out of the influence of the older Tchaikovsky (to whom he was not related). There are two oddities. One consists of a pair of Kipling settings for mezzo and viola, rather freely translated but responding to a poet the Anglophile composer understood and admired; and a bright couple of pieces which take the balalaika as capable of more than folksy janglings.