Hvorostovsky's baritone, still one of the great voices, can combine dark timbre with an emotional warmth to offset the granitic style; while pianist Ivari Ilja, although unable to mimic apocalyptic trumpets at the start of the flickering harp at the end, conjures up all the rest with austere commitment.

There’s no grandstanding here, as can be his way in opera. Hvorostovsky offers searching readings of these rugged, jagged songs which are full of resignation and bittersweet regret, of loss and separation...Ivari Ilja, Hvorostovsky’s regular accompanist, catches the prickly anger in ‘Creativity’, hammering at his forge.

Hvorostovsky and Ilja capture the right degree of bleakness, anger and intensity. There is something of the iron fist in a velvet glove to Hvorostovsky’s voice here, and that velvet thins just often enough to reveal the edge beneath. His baritone may now be a touch too craggy for Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnets, but he and Ilja shape them stylishly.