Sung by Tatiana Makushina (Soprano)

The Spirit of Heaven
By the River Don
Yeremoushka's Cradle Song
Gathering Mushrooms

We know Modesto Moussorgsky (1839-1881) as one of the group of Russian composers called 'The Five' who, in the nineteenth century, with high patriotism and splendid determination, set Russian music on its feet, and for the first time in its history won recognition for Russia as a musical nation. Few of these men lived by music. Most of the group were state servants of some sort. For a time Moussorgsky was an officer in the guards. He threw up his commission and became a government servant in the lower ranks; poverty soon came into his ill-regulated life, and drink hastened his death at the early age of forty-two.

In the fifty or so songs he wrote, we often get the benefit of Moussorgsky's bold free individuality and amateur status; sometimes, indeed, we have in his work the happiest product of the inspired amateur.
He had an astonishing variety of styles; some of them he took ready made from predecessors, and some he hammered out for himself.

At one moment (as in that little masterpiece Gathering Mushrooms) he is cleverly combining a folk-song strain with the art-song manner; at another he is lyrical, in the manner of composers of other nations; now he is frankly sentimental and again realistically descriptive or declamatory.