There is little here likely to be familiar to Western listeners, unless they have spent some time among Russian amateur musicians or perhaps in the Moscow or St Petersburg restaurants and night-clubs which still provide live music. Few of the composers make it into the Soviet Musical Encyclopaedia, let alone into Grove; but many Russians will know at any rate some of their songs, perhaps from much-thumbed sheet music usually kept in Canterburies or the seats of old-fashioned piano stools.

Rather than being known by the Russian word pesnya, such a song is generally described by the term adopted from French, romans. This is how many Russian composers, conscious of their French inheritance as well as their Russian roots, entitled their songs: Tchaikovsky, for instance, preferred the term romans, and into his idiom there filtered much of this domestic, frequently sentimental manner. With him, it is dignified into art which can often touch greatness.

There is no pretence at greatness here, even in the setting of one of Pushkin’s most famous lyrics, his gentle, generous farewell to a lover, ‘I Loved You’ (‘Ya vas lyubil’). However sweetly Hvorostovsky sings it, he cannot make it seem more than kitschy, and as with most of the other songs the mood is emphasised by the crooning accordion and the soft jangle of domra and balalaika. Best heard in a smoky cellar with plenty of Stolichnaya to hand