Songs From Mother Russia, Delivered by a Native Son

 

 

CLASSICAL MUSIC REVIEW

Songs From Mother Russia, Delivered by a Native Son

By Anthony Tommasini

 

March 21, 2005

 

It has long been accepted in the field of opera and vocal music that as the world has gotten smaller and artists have maintained jet-setting international careers, national styles of singing have been losing their distinctiveness. Yet the splendid recital at Carnegie Hall on Friday night by the Siberian-born baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, accompanied by the formidable pianist Ivari Ilja, was a reminder that for some artists being a Russian singer really means something.

 

Mr. Hvorostovsky can be wonderful in Italian opera and in French roles, like Valentin in Gounod's "Faust," which he will sing in the Metropolitan Opera's new production next month. But in sets of Russian songs by Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff, the charismatic Mr. Hvorostovsky sang peerlessly, bringing to his performances an authoritative feeling for the style, a deep sense of culture and an instinctive ability to match vocal and linguistic colorings.

 

Some in the audience may have wondered why he chose to sing so many songs on themes of death, despair and isolation. You could imagine him answering: "I am Russian. Need I say more?"

 

He got right to the point in the opening song by Tchaikovsky, "Death." The poetic text, by Dmitri Merezhkovsky, hails death as a new dawn, the end of a battle. Intriguingly, Tchaikovsky sets the text to a wistful, major-mode waltz.

The combination of Mr. Hvorostovsky's voice, with its dusky colorings, grainy texture and melancholic cast, and the yearning attitude he conveyed lulled you into a state in which you were ready to be guided to "death with a smile," as the text states. Especially if Mr. Hvorostovsky were to be your guide.

He was equally fine in four other Tchaikovsky songs and in a set of mercurial and rhapsodic Rachmaninoff songs. But the high point was the performance of Mussorgsky's "Songs and Dances of Death." Here death appears as a disarming character who sings and dances his way into the lives of his victims: a sickly baby, a fatally ill young woman, a drunk passed out in a wintry forest and a whole field of soldiers. In the best sense, Mr. Hvorostovsky was lost to himself, caught up in every moment of the music and the stories, singing with such conversational power that you would have thought he was speaking.

To remind us that he is not just a Russian singer, he gave elegant accounts of five exquisite French songs by Duparc and, for his first encore, an openhearted rendition of "Mariu," a Neapolitan song. But with his final encore, he was back on message, singing a hauntingly beautiful solo performance of a soulful Russian folk song. He didn't say what it was or what it was about. It didn't matter.

 

Songs From Mother Russia, Delivered by a Native Son - The New York Times (nytimes.com)