This recording features one of today’s most sought-after conductors, Vladimir Jurowski, who was appointed Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2007, with many of his recordings on the LPO Label being chosen for special mentions by BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone magazine.

When Rachmaninov finally settled in Switzerland in the early 1930s, it was here, in the tranquil surroundings he needed for inspiration, that he wrote the Third Symphony. Sir Henry Wood, writing in his autobiography My Life of Music (1938), predicted that Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony would ‘prove as popular as Tchaikovsky’s Fifth’.

These arrangements of Rachmaninov’s 10 Songs were made by Vladimir Jurowski’s grandfather, also called Vladimir (1915–72), whose first experience of Rachmaninov’s music was in Russia after the Second World War. He orchestrated 10 songs specifically for the celebrated Russian tenor Ivan Kozlovsky, who recorded them with the conductor Kiril Kondrashin.

This is the first digital recording of Rachmaninov’s 10 Songs, performed here by the orchestra and Russian tenor, Vsevolod Grivnov, who became a soloist of the New Opera Company of Moscow’s Municipal Theatre in 1990 and is also a principal soloist with the Bolshoi Theatre.

These recordings were taken from a live concert performance at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall on 29 April 2015 as part of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Rachmaninov: Inside Out concert series in its 2014/15 concert season.

‘Jurowski’s reading of the Third Symphony was most remarkable for its discipline, the brief lament for horn, clarinet and cello so audaciously quiet and finely blended that you had to hold your breath.’ - The Times, 2015