Christ is risen Op.26 No.6 (1906)

She is as Lovely as the Noon Op.14 No.9 (1896)

The Waterlily Op.8 No.1 (1893)

A Dream Op.8 No.5 (1893)

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 Richard 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, Christ is risen is the centre of gravity of the Fifteen Romances written at Ivanovka in the late summer of 1906, shortly before the composer’s departure for Dresden and the composition of his 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 three remaining items in this group, all written before the disastrous first performance of the First Symphony, are more lyrical conceptions, though not in every case without a characteristic proportion of melancholy. Offset by the exquisite little Waterlily that comes between them, both of the others are songs of regret, both brought into confrontation with reality by a brief but significant intervention from the piano – just one low note half-way through She is as Lovely as the Noon, two notes before the last line of each stanza of the otherwise rapturously melodious Dream.