Rachmaninov: Songs

This is the first complete recording for 20 years of Rachmaninov’s published song output. With the addition of two delightfully comic occasional pieces, it lays two further claims to importance: Delphian’s seven singers – hand-picked by renowned pianist Iain Burnside – are all native Russian speakers, and every song is performed in the key in which Rachmaninov wrote it, respecting both the specificity of vocal colour and the carefully designed tonal and expressive trajectory within each opus.

For the first 25 years of his career Rachmaninov regularly expressed himself in song, from Tchaikovskian beginnings to the very personal range of vocal and pianistic utterance in his final two collections. Almost a century after exile brought down the curtain on this period of his creative output, Burnside and his singers bring these works to shimmering, gushing, crackling, magnificent life.