3 Songs

Khristos voskres Op.26 No.6 (1906)

Davno v lyubvi Op.14 No.3 (1896)

Ona, kak polden' khorosha Op.14 No.9 (1896)

If Rachmaninov had not had to leave Russia in the middle of his career – a couple of months after the October Revolution in 1917 – he might well have become one of the great song composers of the twentieth century, alongside the likes of Debussy and Strauss. Certainly, he wrote well over eighty songs at fairly regular intervals during the twenty-five years before his departure and none at all in the twenty-six years left to him after that. It was as though, having cut himself off from his native country and its language, he had cut himself from its poetry too. Whatever the reasons for his abandonment of the medium, it was uncompromising and absolute.

One of the most impressive of all Rachmaninov’s songs, Khristos voskres is the centre of gravity of the Fifteen Romances written at Ivanovka in the late summer of 1906, shortly before the his departure for Dresden and the composition of the Second Symphony. In spite of the pianist’s allusions to the Easter chant from the Obikhod in the opening and closing bars, it is not a hymn to Easter but, far from it, a bitterly ironic, eloquently declaimed denunciation of the evil in the modern world.

The Twelve Romances Op.14 were the last songs Rachmaninov wrote before the traumatic failure of his First Symphony in 1897 and indeed – apart from one or two isolated examples – the last before the success of the Second Piano Concerto restored his self-confidence in 1901. This is not to say, however, that gloom was unknown to him when working on his Op.14. His choice of Afanasy Fet’s Davno v lyubvi and his setting of it, with its drooping vocal line and dramatically eloquent piano part, surely confirm that he was well acquainted with melancholy even then. Scarcely happier, as the piano’s fateful bass notes between the two stanzas and at the end suggeat, Ona, kak polden' khorosha is one of a pair of fascinatingly and aptly orientalist settings of texts signed by N. Minsky, a pseudonym adopted by the Jewish poet N.M. Vilennkin.