Khristos voskries Op.26 No.6 (1906)

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

Rechnaja lileya Op.8 No.1 (1893)

Son Op.38 No.5 (1916)

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 voskrie 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 soprano Nina Pavlovna Koshetz briefly had a role in Rachmaninov’s life not dissimilar to that of Hermine Spies in Brahms’s. Rachmaninov was younger than Brahms when the friendship began but, suffering from a renewal of the depression brought about by the disastrous first performance of the First Symphony nearly twenty years earlier, he was more in need of a creative tonic. Preceded on this occasion by two songs from before the First Symphony – the regretful Ona kak polden' harasha, marked by a doom-laden intervention low in the pianist’s left hand halfway through, and the contrastingly exqusite Rechnaja lileya – Son is a characteristically poetic Koshetz inspiration. Whereas an earlier song with the same title (to words translated from Heine) twice confronts the dream with reality, this Sologub setting floats above it an impressionistic rapture magically sustained in the piano postlude.