Travel Tip: Classical Music in United States
Dmitri Hvorostovsky, baritone

Songs by Rachmaninoff and Georgy Sviridov

Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote 82 songs between 1890 (when he was only 17 years old) and 1916, one year before leaving Russia never to return. His compositional style is the epitome of late-Russian Romanticism.

The second half of the program features selections from a song cycle entitled Petersburg by Georgy Sviridov, one of Russia's most important composers in the last half of the 20th century. Set to texts by Aleksandr Blok, we hear songs that describe a near-mythic St. Petersburg, an apocalyptic future, Blok's muse-like "Beautiful Lady," and Russian mysticism—all in Sviridov's characteristic style, not avant-garde but idiosyncratically tonal.

Dmitri Hvorostovsky, baritone
Ivari Ilja, piano