Elena Prokina left St Petersburg and the Kirov Opera in the early 90s to seek her fortune in the West. That doesn't necessarily make her special - half her colleagues, it would seem, did the same thing. But what does make her stand out is the very individual quality of her soprano. While she retains that distinctive Russian sound, meaning she can lace the music of her compatriots with flasks full of dense, glutinous tone, it's the freshness and agility of her voice that you notice when she first begins to sing.
With this in mind, you can see why opening her all-Russian recital with a wordless song might have seemed a good idea. Yet, while Medtner's 1922 Sonata-Vocalise threw the spotlight on the pure, unfettered lyricism of her singing, it also cast a less flattering glare on the fact that, to be frank, Prokina doesn't always sing in tune. Seemingly not quite familiar enough with the piece, she at times seemed to be doing her best to drag her pianist, Alexej Goribol, into the next key down the scale.
However, Prokina is a feisty performer and wasn't going to be wrong-footed. Five settings by Prokofiev of Anna Akhmatova's poetry put her into her stride, showing off the whole, even-toned range of her voice. Performing from memory, and with words on which to hang her singing, she was far more secure. And Stravinsky's Two Songs were not only expressive but slightly mischievous too, even if the bells in the piano accompaniment to the first song, Spring, weren't really allowed to clang.
The Five Poems on Words by Fedor Tyutchev, set in 1976 by the living Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov, found in Prokina and Goribol two eloquent exponents. In the final song, Mal'aria, they generated a real sense of tension, Goribol playing at last at full tilt. Desyatnikov's melodic writing may be old-fashioned, wearing unashamedly the badge of Shostakovich's influence, but the small distortions he creates within its framework are tellingly effective.
Prokina trained as an actress, and it shows. Her cute yet glamorous stage presence seems suspiciously natural; more tellingly, her song interpretations were more effective the more they involved her taking on a character. She had the audience laughing out loud in Shostakovich's five Satires, which she delivered with virtuosic panache. Prokina is first and foremost an opera singer; but even on the recital platform, she's still a stage animal.
