Disc One:
1-6 Six Songs Op. 4
7-12 Six Songs Op. 8
13-24 Twelve Songs Op. 14
25 Were you hiccupping, Natasha?:
Disc Two
1-12 Twelve Songs Op. 21
13-27 Fifteen Songs Op. 26
28 A Letter to K.S. Stanislavsky
from S. Rachmaninov:
Disc Three
1-14 Fourteen Songs Op. 34
15-20 Six Songs Op. 38.

This is the first complete recording for twenty years of Rachmaninov’s published song output. With the addition of two delightfully comic occasional pieces, it lays two further claims to importance: our 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 twenty-five years of his career Rachmaninov regularly expressed himself in song, from Tchaikovskian beginnings to the extraordinarily 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. 'performances of total focus' - BBC Music Magazine 'these performances, with Burnside the immaculae accompanist, are exemplary' - The Guardian