Hvorostovsky mines unsuspected riches
The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Richard Todd
When one sees a tall, muscular and handsome male Russian singer, one almost automatically expects to hear a bass voice issuing from his mouth, somethinglike the legendary sounds of Chaliapin or Christoff (who was Bulgarian,actually.) Dimitri Hvorostovsky, though he meets the physical criteria, and though hisvoice is dark and powerful, resides squarely within the baritone range. This may keep him from being a convincing Boris Godunov or Don Philippe, butpositions him ideally to take on the song repertoire of Russian masters likeTchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. The large audience who came to hear Hvorostovsky in his National Arts Centrerecital debut last night heard a program of unsuspected riches by thesecomposers, far better known for their orchestral music than for art songs. Neither Tchaikovsky nor Rachmaninov was a Schumann or a Brahms when it cameto song, of course. Yesterday's recital presented nine songs by eachcomposer and they were, admittedly, of variable quality. There was none,however, that wasn't worth hearing and rehearing. Of the Tchaikovsky songs, Hvorostovsky made the strongest impression withAgain, as before, I am alone, one of the composer's very last works. ThisWinterreisse-like item finds him at his most profound, and foundHvorostovsky at his most expressive. There were times, as in I bless you, woods, when he seemed to be coasting onthe admittedly considerable beauty of his voice without attempting to findall the poetry in the notes. But for the most part, there was little tocomplain of. Rachmaninov drew his text from a wider and better variety of poets andthemes -- only a couple of those on yesterday'ss program were love songs, forexample, none of them as sentimental as most of Tchaikovsky's. One remembers particularly the cold sadness of When yesterday we met and thegrim pessimism of Christ is risen. Despite an occasional bit of hardness at the top of Hvorostovsky's range, heand his accompanist, Mikhail Arkadiev, put together thoroughly convincingaccounts of this wonderful repertoire. The program was short, but supplemented by an encore, a fine account ofCredo in Dio crudel from Verdi's Otello, and that was followed by abeautiful unaccompanied Russian song.