Tim Ashley 

Hvorostovsky/Arkadiev

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London *****
  
  


The marketing material for Dmitri Hvorostovsky's latest recital is anything but subtle. Emblazoned on both poster and programme cover, we find the phrase "Russian romance". Given that the accompanying photograph shows the handsome Siberian baritone in a flowing open-necked shirt and looking pensively Byronic, one might easily be forgiven for thinking that this is yet another plug for his sex symbol status. In fact, it refers to his programme of love songs by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, most of which are settings of works by poets unfamiliar in Western Europe.

The programme is extremely tricky, for there's a certain sameness of mood and imagery in much of the material that Hvorostovsky has chosen. Most of the songs deal with the sadness of separation, the pain and bitterness of emotional loss, the mournful nostalgia for a vanished past. The texts are riddled with forests and nightingales, sultry summer nights and other peoples' love songs. It's the kind of line-up that could easily become cloying when performed by a lesser artist, and it's a measure of Hvorostovsky's genius that we experience not a flicker of tedium throughout and that the emotional range of the evening comes over as being astonishingly wide.

Each song is given a uniquely pertinent characterisation. Tchaikovsky's Fearful Moment has a lover presenting his mistress with an ultimatum. Hvorostovsky delivers it with an edgy defensiveness, and the witty emotional insecurity of Tchaikovsky's own Onegin. The "sad songs of Georgia" that haunt Rachmaninov's famous setting of Pushkin usually provoke singers to the delivery of dreamy melismas, but here the vocal line is pushed closer to an anguished wail. The dominant tone of self-pity is sometimes broken by a redefinition of love in terms of spirituality or carnality.

Rachmaninov lurches into Dostoevskyan territory with Christ is Risen and He Has Taken All from Me, in which sexual and mystical suffering are morbidly equated. Hvorostovsky vocally writhes through both songs with almost manic ferocity. He gives us two very contrasting portraits of Don Juan, the serenades by Tchaikovsky and Mozart, the latter from Don Giovanni, offered as an encore. He turns Tchaikovsky's seducer into a cold sadist, hectoring a response from his mistress, while the accompaniment, flawlessly played by Mikhail Arkadiev, swirls beneath him in demonic pointillism. Mozart's Don, by contrast, has an erotic blatancy that just makes you go weak at the knees.

Hvorostovsky ends his recital about love ironically, with another encore that forms the ultimate musical embodiment of lovelessness, namely Iago's Creed from Verdi's Otello. Its blasphemous horror and nihilistic wit are offset by the sheer beauty of his singing. His voice, powerful, velvety and sinuous, remains a thing of wonder. He can pack a house on artistry alone, rendering sexy marketing ploys redundant.

 

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