Weinberg’s songs comprise some 30 of his 154 opuses, but they have lagged seriously behind in terms of recordings. Tomasz Raff has been performing the nine works for bass voice over the past six years or more. In 2022 he released the four cycles to Polish texts (‘Mother Tongue’ on Opus Series); now he adds the five to Russian words.

Apart from Shakespeare, Weinberg turned to three prominent 19th-century Russian poets and two Soviet ones (in the three songs, Op 78). The texts are romantic in their imagery and moods, but the settings are predominantly severe in tone, with pared-down lines for both voice and piano, and a harmonic language that rivals, even outdoes, Shostakovich for astringency. The words are given every chance to register, but the task for singer and pianist to bring them off the page is not an enviable one. There is a minimum of word-painting, and while most settings faithfully reflect the mood of the poems, others seem almost wilfully contradictory: in the Baratynski verses, the ‘Old Man’ seems paradoxically sprightly, and the ‘Storm’ not conspicuously stormy. Yet this cycle is on the whole less austere than the Zhukovsky and Fet collections, and even here there are jewels to be found, such as No 7 of the Fet, which echoes the rocking figurations of Weinberg’s ‘Lulling the Child’ (with two more mezzo and soprano collections on Toccata Classics), and the final Zhukovsky song, dedicated to Pushkin and set in such a way as to be highly suggestive of a tribute to Shostakovich (who had died the previous year). The Soviet songs are not so ambitious, but they are products of the early 1960s Thaw years, and as such decently poetic, unlike the Op 38 Soviet songs with their compulsory conformist encomia of the anti-formalist late 1940s.

Raff’s years of deep study in this repertoire are evident in the dedication of his interpretations and, indeed, in the sensitivity of his booklet note. His pianists give him no less dedicated support. For the Shakespeare Sonnets – the most approachable and most expressively varied of the five works – he lightens the voice effectively at strategic moments, and the accompaniments give more scope for his pianist to show finesse. Elsewhere there would be scope for greater range of colour and subtlety of tone. But as a pioneering venture this album cannot be too highly praised.