This record was released in 1984, and it can be called a “jubilee record”, because the year of its release coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Solomon Khromchenko’s joining the Bolshoi Theatre company. Over the previous eight years he had recorded more than twenty old romances, ‘Misty Morning’ and ‘Weeping Willows Are Dormant’ being the first. Eleven of them, after numerous auditions, this extremely demanding performer considered worthy of inclusion in the disc. A colleague, friend and neighbour of Solomon Markovich, tenor Anatoly Ivanovich Orfenov, who came by chance to the control room of the Moscow House of Sound Recording, recalled: ‘Here I am sitting in the hall of the House of Sound Recording and listening to only recently recorded by S. M. Khromchenko songs and romances. What an enviable longevity! How young his beautiful voice sounds!’