 |
|
|||
Siberians in Sintra |
||||
It was no coincidence that two boys from Siberia should star in the same week at Sintra's music festival. The Russian orientation of this annual event, which takes place in a variety of exotic venues in the misty hills outside Lisbon, is a reflection of the unique circumstances in which it was born and bred.
The Festival de Música de Sintra was founded 40 years ago by the Marquesa Olga de Cadaval, whose circle of friends included Poulenc and Stravinsky and whose protégés included Jacqueline du Pre, Daniel Barenboim and Vladimir Ashkenazy. From the start, the Marquesa packed her programs with performers from beyond the Iron Curtain: she persuaded Portugal's longtime dictator Salazar, who hated both Jews and Communists, to let her regularly import large quantities of both. By encouraging the involvement of the Gulbenkian Foundation, she ensured that her festival had a first-rate financial underpinning. In 2002, five years after her death at age 97, her bequest remains in excellent hands, her artistic policies intact.
Dmitri Hvorostovsky sang in the mirrored music-chamber of the Palace of Queluz, which is contemporaneous with the Palace of Versailles and designed in a remarkably similar style. Ably accompanied by Mikhail Arkadiev, professor of piano at the Gnessin Academy in Moscow, this debonair baritone gave a recital which chimed perfectly with its graceful surroundings. First came a selection of Tchaikovsky's songs, drawn from all stages of the composer's life but exhibiting a notable consistency of style. Hvorostovsky's stage persona may be a trifle stiff for opera, but he's a born recitalist who knows how to extract maximum effect from the combination of his flowing silver locks and his rich, even tone.
The early song "I wanted, in just one word" emerged in a single unbroken exhalation of yearning; the long melodic lines of "I opened the window" had comparable impetus. At times in this first section of the concert, Hvorostovsky sang too forcefully to communicate the tremulousness indicated in the texts, but he understood the importance of delivering each of these impassioned gems as a concentrated outpouring of lyrical thought. The conclusion of "I bless you, forests, valleys, fields" was a blazing furnace of sorrow; "My genius, my angel" ended spookily, with the voice seeming to fade into the distance.
Rachmaninoff's songs continued the musical argument where Tchaikovsky left off. They're harmonically freer and more oblique — the younger composer was not impelled to speak with the elder's raw, unironic directness. Hvorostovsky himself seemed freer here, and able to play technical games: in "Do not sing, my beauty, to me" (a favorite of male recitalists) he matched his timbre beautifully to the shifting images of the text. Generous with his encores, he finished with an a cappella Russian folk song — the sweetest moment of a gilded evening.
From Maxim Vengerov, performing in the brand-new Centro Cultural Olga Cadaval, we got fireworks of an unexpected sort. He seemed ill at ease — adding unwanted notes — as he launched into Bruno Fox-Lefriche's violin arrangement of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, but was soon filling the auditorium with a kaleidoscope of sound every bit as rich as that of the organ for which this towering work was originally written. This segued perfectly into Ysa˙e's second solo violin sonata, in which shards of the Bach briefly reappeared. Vengerov wound up his first half with Rodion Shchedrin's "Echo" Sonata, Op. 69, which is every bit as flamboyant as the Ysa˙e in both structure and style, with illusions of scale and distance creating often-comic effects.
Taking his bow at the interval, he then asked for silence. "Ladies and gentlemen, this afternoon I fell on my right arm and slightly injured it. The result is, it now hurts me very much to play, and I fear I must now leave you." Gasps of astonishment, followed by warm applause: the capacity audience were both sympathetic and grateful, as though even half an evening of this sort of music was sustenance enough.