If, as Anton Rubinstein argued, ‘song (romance) is the only musical genre to have a homeland’,Footnote ¹ then Russian song might appear to be terra incognita for many Western audiences (and not a few Russian ones too). Despite being a form in which nearly all major Russian composers have worked (Scriabin being a notable exception), record companies have devoted far less attention to this crucial part of the repertoire than they have to, say, the French and German traditions. To be sure, there are some notable exceptions to this state of affairs, some driven by the reputation of star performers, others by the status of particular composers.Footnote ² A recent recording of songs by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov performed by Anna Netrebko and Daniel Barenboim recalls earlier anthologies by figures such as Olga Borodina, Galina Gorchakova and Dmitry Hvorostovsky. Younger singers, too, have often chosen to make their recorded debut with an anthology of Russian songs, as in the case of Ekaterina Semenchuk or Daniil Shtoda, both graduates of the Mariinsky Theatre's academy for young singers. Major composer-led recordings might include sets of the complete songs of Prokofiev and Shostakovich (both on Delos), or Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov (both on Brilliant Classics). That all of the singers involved in these recordings are Russian testifies to the evident difficulty for foreign singers in overcoming a difficult and unfamiliar language (although this barrier is often overstated, and has not, in any case, prevented non-Russian artists from taking on such roles as Tatyana and Onegin in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, or Germann and Lisa in the same composer's Queen of Spades). A Russian mother gave Elisabeth Söderström a natural advantage when it came to making her pioneering recording of Rachmaninoff's complete songs (as well as anthologies of selected works by other composers). Of non-Russian performers, Joan Rodgers stands out for her commitment to the Russian repertoire; and a recent recital disc of Tchaikovsky romances by Christianne Stotijn is an impressive demonstration what can be achieved by a singer without a native command of the language, but with a fine ear and an ability to enter into the acoustic and emotional world of Russian poetry. A number of scholarly and critical works do exist that might further facilitate the Western encounter with Russian song. Chief amongst these is Richard Sylvester's Tchaikovsky's Complete Songs: A Companion with Texts and Translations, which not only offers detailed commentary on individual works, but sheds much original light on Russian song culture in the second half of the nineteenth century from both a musical and literary perspective (a volume devoted to the songs of Rachmaninoff is currently in preparation).Footnote ³ For singers, Laurence Richter's six volumes of song texts in the original Russian, with English translation and phonetic transcription constitute an important practical resource, although they contain nothing by way of contextual material.Footnote ⁴ Yet it is striking that – in contrast to the song traditions of other European cultures – no overarching survey of Russian song exists in English, let alone detailed individual studies of the composers and poets who constitute this repertoire.

Within this context, Naxos's recording of Russian Songs by Mikhail Svetlov and Pavlina Dokovska constitutes a convenient starting point for anybody interested in getting to know the Russian vocal canon. Consisting of 22 works by the five members of the so-called moguchaya kuchka (‘might handful’, or the Balakirev circle), it paints a useful picture of the state of song in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century (the exclusion of the kuchka's traditional antipode, Tchaikovsky, can perhaps be explained by the fact that Naxos has also released recordings of his complete songs, performed by Ljuba Kazarnovskaya and Ljuba Orfenova). Even within the kuchka, there was a striking fault-line that ran between Musorgsky's songs and those of its other members. As Caryl Emerson suggests, Musorgsky was ‘extremely sensitive to the focus, or placement, of consciousness.’Footnote ⁵ This sensitivity gave rise to songs in which, as Emerson argues, ‘both performer and audience live through the experience in the present tense’.Footnote ⁶ By contrast, the songs of Balakirev, Borodin, Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov are closer to the established romance tradition, with its emphasis on the ‘the spontaneous overflow of emotions recollected in tranquillity’ (to recalls Wordsworth's famous definition of lyric poetry). Granted, Rimsky-Korsakov's setting of Pushkin's ‘The Prophet’ (Op. 49, No. 2) exhibits elements of a declamatory approach to text-setting that recalls aspects of Musorgsky's work (as does the rather broad humour of Balakirev's ‘They keep calling me a fool’), and Borodin's songs are imbued with a distinctly balladic spirit. Yet despite their reputation for espousing a kind of musical realism that was shaped by the positivist spirit of the 1860s,Footnote ⁷ the songs of the kuchka betray a strange residual romanticism that complicates the picture of the Russian arts in the mid-century. This irony is clearest in the case of Cui. His critical writings often espoused a rabid form of musical nationalism, yet he revealed himself to be little able to appreciate Musorgsky's experiments in the field of song, and his own works are milder and open to a greater range of cosmopolitan influences than his reputation might suggest. That Svetlov and Dokovska limit themselves to Cui's two most famous songs – ‘The Statue at Tsarskoye Selo’ (Op. 57, No. 17) and ‘Thou and You’ (Op. 57, No. 11) – merely confirms this impression; a detailed and more nuanced verdict on the composer must await the rediscovery of his more than 400 songs. The CD contains brisk and efficient notes on the individual songs by Keith Anderson, although the translations of the texts themselves are available only via the Naxos website.

As for the performances themselves, Svetlov – a principal bass soloist at Moscow's Bolshoy Theatre – has an expressive and well-behaved voice with an admirable consistency of tone from bottom to top. His dramatic instincts are put to best use in the Musorgsky songs (although he lacks the pungency of Sergei Leiferkus or the suavity of Hvorostovsky, both of whom have made keynote recordings of the Songs and Dances of Death). The more lyrical songs on the disc fare less well; Svetlov's somewhat relentless sense of delivery tends to rob them of poetic and musical charm, although his diction is clean and his phrasing is intelligent. Throughout, he is admirably partnered by Polina Dokovska, whose muscular and forthright playing is a good match for the operatic timbre of Svetlov's voice. It is particular interesting to hear this repertoire performed by a male singer; many of the songs of the kuchka were, in fact, composed with women's voices in mind, whether that of Rimsky-Korsakov's sister-in-law, Aleksandra Purgold (later Molas), or the various divas with whom Musorgsky performed. The subsequent prominence of singers such as Fyodor Chaliapin and Boris Christoff as interpreters of Russian nationalist works has tended to occlude this female tradition, despite the crucial role played by, say, Maria Olenina d'Alheim in resurrecting the songs of Musorgsky from the neglect into which they had fallen after his death.Footnote ⁸ In the case of Songs and Dances of Death, there is a strong case for female performance: the Russian word for death – smert′ – is grammatically feminine, and a working title for the composition was Ona (the Russian personal pronoun for ‘she’). The personification of death as feminine is an important element in this particular cycle (whether in dialogue with the mother in the opening ‘Lullaby’ or in contrast to the figure of the Field Marshal in the eponymous closing number), and lends a particular emotional intensity to interpretations by Galina Vishnevskaya (including an indispensable DVD recording of a live performance recorded in Paris in 1970),Footnote ⁹ Lina Mkrtchyan, Ewa Podleś or the incomparable Brigitte Fassbaender.

Russian Songs embodies Naxos's reputation for providing inexpensive recordings of mainstream repertoire in usually more than acceptable performances. The two discs issues by the Russian label ‘Northern Flowers’ represent a more unusual and specialist approach, making available recordings of almost entirely unfamiliar works written in the first four decades of the twentieth century, a crucial period in the history of Russian song whose important remains to be studied even in outline, let along in specific detail. Key monographs by the principal Soviet scholar of Russian song, Vera Vasina-Grossman, concentrated on nineteenth-century and Soviet periods respectively,Footnote ¹⁰ yet treated the so-called ‘Silver Age’ with considerable scepticism. To be sure, Medtner, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky do give some indication of the evolution of Russian song after the deaths of Tchaikovsky and the members of the moguchaya kuchka, and before Shostakovich and Sviridov were to reaccent the genre once more in the Soviet period. Yet the turn of the century was a period of great vitality in the history of Russian song (and its influence continued well beyond 1917, extending to the final years of the 1920s, before Stalin's cultural revolution took hold). Central to this vitality were developments in contemporary Russian poetry, which after a long period of neglect became the most prominent literary genre. Moreover, with its intense interest in music – whether as a romantic metaphor for the vocation of poet itself, or as a way of commenting on Russian poetry's ability to conjure up remarkable effects of sound orchestration that are hard to capture in translation – Russian modernist poetry could not but attract the attention of Russian composers. It is for this reason that figures such as Rachmaninoff and Medtner as so deceptive in the history of Russian song; Rachmaninoff was criticised by the poet Marietta Shaginyan for his neglect of contemporary poetry (although he made up for this deficiency with the astonishing and valedictory set of Six Songs, Op. 38 (1916)); and Medtner's taste was for principally for the classical poetry of Pushkin and Goethe.

Yet many other composers did engage with the latest developments in Russian verse, and the two new recordings by Northern Flowers shed much new and fascinating light on Russian literary and musical culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. Both CDs are structured around settings of a single poet, and such literary anthologies can be a profoundly productive way of challenging the boundaries of the musical canon. A classic instance in the Russian context would be the use of Pushkin as a way of structuring a song recital or recording, and important recordings by Vassily Savenko and Sergej Larin have documented the role played by foreign poetry in the Russian song tradition too. Although Mikhail Kuzmin is now established as one of the leading Russian modernist poets,Footnote ¹¹ his musical legacy – although long known about – has been far less studied.Footnote ¹² The extent of Kuzmin's musical abilities has been debated; he studied for a couple of years at the St Petersburg conservatoire in the 1890s and appears to have composed several hundred songs, although Boris Asaf′yev – in an observation cited in the CD booklet – later suggested that he had ‘the taste of a strict master, with execution following the whims of a dilettante’. Listening to Kuzmin's settings of his own Alexandrian Songs, one might be tempted to agree with Asaf′yev; their musical language is decidedly simple, even simplistic, and their effects seem more accidental than calculated or conscious, although they are a number of felicitous moments that suggest Kuzmin might have had a career as the kind of minor miniaturist that St Petersburg so excelled in producing (the Sacred Songs are more full-blooded). Yet what is most important about the Alexandrian Songs is the role that they played in clarifying Kuzmin's vocation as a poet. He seems to have first begun the cycle in spring 1905, and from the very outset, conceived of them with a musical accompaniment of his own devising; a number of them were first heard in public in St Petersburg at a concert of the ‘Evenings of Contemporary Music’ on 28 November 1905. By 1906, however, a number of them were published – without music – in a leading symbolist journal, and thereafter, the poems lived a primarily literary life (musical settings of twelve poems were eventually published, in two volumes, in 1921). It was the Alexandrian Songs that established Kuzmin as a literary figure (Dmitry Mirsky called them ‘the first swallow of the classical spring’).Footnote ¹³ They attest to the profound influence of classical culture on Russian literature of the turn of the century (often mediated through Western Europe – the influence of Pierre Louÿs's Chansons de Bilitis is evident throughout), as well as a sense of how Russian modernist poetry aspired to what Walter Pater had earlier called ‘the condition of music’.

There is a further element crucial to an understanding of these songs: that of sexuality and eroticism. At the time Kuzmin was working on his Alexandrian Songs, he was also writing his novella, Wings, which caused something of a scandal on its publication in late 1906. Wings depicts the coming of age of a young Russian man who comes to understand his own homosexuality though the influence of Greek literature, and through the presence of an older, more knowledgeable man whose role echoes that of the active lover in the classical model of the paederastic relationship of Athenian antiquity. Around 1906, Kuzmin found himself at the centre of a homosexual subculture in St Petersburg that brought together music, poetry and the study of Greek culture. The Evenings of Contemporary Music were frequented by a number of gay men in St Petersburg who espoused a queer aesthetic that was a major element in the circle surrounding the World of Art journal (and later, the Ballets Russes). In 1906, Kuzmin also began to frequent one of St Petersburg's leading salons, the so-called ‘Tower’ of Vyacheslav Ivanov, and it was here that Kuzmin read extracts from his diary, giving details of his sexual exploits in the parks and bath-houses of the Russian capital. The circulation of the Alexandrian Songs at this time is thus closely associated with a particular moment in the development of a queer subculture in St Petersburg.

The eroticism of the Alexandrian Songs forms an indirect link with the second CD issued by Northern Flowers, Sonetti Romani: Viacheslav Ivanov in music of Myaskovsky, Lourié, Shebalin, Gretchaninov. Two of the cycles included here – Arthur Lourié's Greek Songs (written 1914, published 1918) and Vissarion Shebalin's Five Fragments from Sappho (written 1922–23, published 1926) – are based on the translations of Sappho (and Alcaeus) that Ivanov published in 1914, and that, like Kuzmin's Alexandrian Songs, encouraged from their composers settings of considerable stylized restraint. Lourié has been the focus of considerable amount of scholarly attention in recent years, whether because of his reputation as a musical futurist, as a lover of Anna Akhmatova (several of whose poems he set to music), a leading member of the Bolshevik cultural administration in the immediate post-revolutionary years, or as a member of the Eurasianist movement in émigré Paris in the interwar period.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet his activities as a composer have been less studied, and only a few recordings of his works are available. His Greek Songs employ a deliberately stripped-down musical language that suggests – not least by means of suggestive tempo indications such as ‘très modéré, cristallin’ – a decidedly French influence (although perhaps more that of Satie's Gymnopédies than of Debussy's Chansons de Bilitis). Responding the fragmentary nature of the surviving texts by Sappho, Lourié evokes both the putative modality of ancient Greek music and the sound of lyre itself. Short and often intensely elliptical, the twelve songs can come across as slightly static, even monotonous, and require careful programming and interpretation for their full effect to register. Shebalin's five settings of Sappho's fragments are richer, more inventive and more full-blooded than Lourié's (it is a shame that the opportunity was not also taken to record his later Four Fragments from Sappho, Op. 32, written in 1937–39, but not published until 1970). Their palette is not the pale white of Greek marble, but that of a polychrome, sun-filled Mediterranean landscape.

If, along with Kuzmin's Alexandrian Songs, the Sappho cycles by Lourié and Shebalin paint a vivid picture of Russian musical neo-classicism before Stravinsky, then the settings of Ivanov's original poetry reveal other aspects of early twentieth-century Russian song. Myaskovsky's Three Sketches (1908) represent a kind of Russian expressionism in which the composer tries to capture the essence of Ivanov's ideas by means of a detailed, word-by-word response to the original text. As early works, they show Myaskovsky struggling to come to terms with a number of audible influences, and in their tendency to linger on the passing image, they sometimes struggle to create a convincing architectonic whole. Much the same could be said about Grechaninov's At the Well, three settings of Ivanov's poetry dating from 1916; again, one feels the composer responding to individual moments without producing either an effective vocal line or a satisfying overall structure. However, in his settings of five of Ivanov's nine Roman Sonnets, the listener is granted something altogether more compelling. In many senses, Ivanov's poetry was not the most obvious for composers to turn to: with its dense philosophical underpinnings and enormous number of erudite literary allusions, it seems destined to present them with simply too many challenges to overcome (just as the supposed ‘musicality’ of much symbolist poetry in fact left very little room for actual music as such).Footnote ¹⁵ But the Roman Sonnets were an astute choice for Grechaninov. Written in just a few weeks in late 1924, they capture Ivanov's excitement at finding himself in the Italian capital through a rush of vivid ecphrastic detail (one critic has suggested that they give ‘the impression of an elite Baedeker guidebook’).Footnote ¹⁶ Four of the five sonnets set by Grechaninov deal with Roman fountains and evoke their subject matter by means of ample and impressionistic piano accompaniments and a soaring vocal line (suggesting, perhaps, the obvious influence of Debussy's setting of Baudelaire's Jet d'eau). Although the booklet rather discouragingly refers to ‘the complete lack of reprises and the desire not to repeat himself literally in a single bar produces the impression of some intellectual affectation’, Grechaninov's settings nonetheless have a expansive musical dramaturgy as well as a responsiveness to the detail of the poems that make them highly communicative and ideal for performance.

The performances on the two Northern Flowers CDs are by Mila Shkirtil and Yuri Serov, both of whom have made a number of recordings for this label, as well as for the American company, Delos. Blessed with a relatively high-lying mezzo-soprano that is light and flexible, Shkirtil is ideal for this repertoire, faring particularly well in the more restrained classical stylizations. Her attention to the subtleties of the scores is matched throughout by the sensitive piano-playing of Serov, and together, it is hard to imagine more convincing advocates for this repertoire. Both CDs are produced in co-operation with the V. Ivanov Research Centre in Rome, and the team involved has provided not just high-quality interpretations and recordings, but also detailed notes and translations of all texts (something that puts many major labels to shame).Footnote ¹⁷ In fact, the whole Northern Flowers catalogue is worth exploring, as it contains important recordings of a vast amount of unfamiliar Russian repertoire (such as the complete songs of Glazunov, for instance). Northern Flowers – and the Ivanov Research Centre – should be applauded for their commitment to making recordings of this fascinating repertoire available. It is to be hoped that their collaboration might now bring us accounts of Anatoly Aleksandrov's virtuosic settings of Kuzmin's Alexandrian Songs, Myaskovsky's many versions of the poetry of Zinaida Gippius, or the various anthologies of modernist poetry set by Mikhail Gnesin, to name only the most scandalously neglected masterpieces of early-twentieth-century Russian vocal music.