Here’s a curious, bold and rather lovely thing: a century-and-a-half survey of Russian art song, featuring five world premiere recordings by Myaskovsky, Shostakovich and Elena Firsova, and sung by a countertenor no less.

Coming relatively late to the party, art song in Russia took off in the drawing-rooms and salons frequented by the likes of Glinka and The Mighty Handful, much of it lyrical, some of it folksong inflected, and most of it setting the well-chosen words of a catalogue of respected poets from Pushkin onwards. Their champion here is Hamish McLaren, a choral scholar at St. John’s College, Cambridge, who fell in love with Russian culture sufficiently to study the language at school. A student at London’s Royal Academy of Music from 2016 to 2019, Ludmilla Andrew taught him Russian song and the college library introduced him to songs by Taneyev, Myaskovsky, and Firsova. A trip to Russia in 2018 found McLaren combing music shops from St Petersburg to Siberia and carrying off many of the songs recorded here, including two previously unrecorded Shostakovich songs written for films.

Spun around the theme of foreign travel...