Evgeny Svetlanov was in a class of his own when it came to conducting Rachmaninov, seeming to have natural instincts for the music’s luminous textures, lyrical power and undercurrents of fatalism that are palpable in this performance of The Isle of the Dead. It was recorded during a concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at London’s Royal Festival Hall in October 1999, along with two of the piano Etudes-tableaux orchestrated by Respighi and a vibrant interpretation of Ravel’s scoring of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.The Isle of the Dead is overwhelming in its intensity here. Svetlanov could often adopt rather more measured tempi than the norm in slow music, and he does so again in the opening Lento, but the effect is to accentuate the apprehensiveness and the dark brooding with which Rachmaninov’s music mirrors the image in the Arnold Böcklin picture that inspired it. The mounting menace as Charon’s boat approaches the forbidding island is shot through with fear, and the sense of panic as the dead soul reaches its destination is terrifying. Svetlanov has a firm dramatic grip, evoking potent atmosphere and harnessing the BBC SO’s spectrum of instrumental colour in giving a performance that both chills and thrills. The same goes for the two Respighi orchestrations, one closely related in mood to The Isle of the Dead, the other contrastingly jubilant, and in the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures he masterfully combines precise characterisation of the individual images with clear structural cohesion.