Pyotr Ilyich TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
The Voyevoda - opera, Op.3 [154.55]
Vladimir Matorin (bass) - Nechay Shalygin; Leonid Zimnenko (bass) - Vlas Dyuzhoy;
Alexandra Fatkina (soprano) – Nastasia; Galina Kuznetsova (soprano)
- Maria Vlasyevna; Ludmila Bondarenko (soprano) - Praskovya Vlasyevna; Anatoly
Mischevsky (tenor) - Stepan Bastryukov; Oleg Klenov (tenor) - Roman Dubrovin;
Yulia Abakumovskaya (mezzo) – Olyona; Vladimir Svistov (bass) –
Rezviy, New Voyevoda; Vyacheslav Voynarovsky (tenor) – Jester; Nina
Isakova (mezzo) – Nedviga
Academic Grand Chorus of Central Television
and All-Union Radio
USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra/Vladimir Kozhukhar
rec. 1982, venue not stated
MELODIYA MELCD1001869 [77.32 + 77.23]
Tchaikovsky’s first opera The Voyevoda –
not, it should be emphasised, the same work as his much later ‘symphonic
ballad’ – was first performed at the Bolshoi in 1869, when it
had a run of five performances. Although it was favourably received in some
quarters at the time, the composer withdrew the work (which was never published)
and recycled some of its material into such works as Swan Lake, his later
opera The Oprichnik, and even the 1812 Overture. He then destroyed the original
score, and it was not until long after his death that the opera was reconstructed
from his sketches and the surviving vocal and orchestral parts — as
also happened with Rachmaninov’s First Symphony. It appears that there
were two such editorial versions: the first was made by Sergei Popov in 1927,
and a later edition then appeared edited by Pavel Lamm. It is perhaps to be
expected, in view of Melodiya’s miserable presentational material of
which I have complained over the last couple of years, that the booklet here
fails even to inform us of the existence of two independent editions of the
score. It merely states that “during the Soviet era The Voyevoda was
reconstructed from surviving manuscripts”. As for which edition is employed
in this issue we are left to guess.
Fortunately the invaluable ISMLP site furnishes us with both the full score
and a vocal score of the opera in the Pavel Lamm edition. From the evidence
of this it would appear that it is this version of the score that it employed
in this recording. It was made in 1982 but never appears to have been available
internationally, and this would seem to be its very first appearance on CD.
Like other such recordings from the Soviet era, it has therefore an immense
value in its own right which is utterly undermined by the failure to provide
any sort of detailed information about what is going on at any point in the
action – just a brief uncued synopsis of less than two pages which summarises
the plot of Act Two, Scene Two (which lasts nearly half an hour) in three
laconic sentences. Furthermore the style of English employed is far from idiomatic:
track titles include “A duck swan on the sea”, “You live
on my yard, Roman, but never shows your face,” “My zealous heart
I sick” and “Here come the boyar with his daughter”. For
a work that will be totally unfamiliar to nearly all listeners, this is simply
not good enough. The scores on the internet provide no languages other than
the original Russian, so they cannot help even those who can read the music
but don’t understand the language.
Having got these complaints off my chest — and I will continue to complain
for as long as Melodiya undermine the value of their reissues with such inadequate
presentation — what of the work itself? Well, it is clear that Tchaikovsky
himself thought little of it, and it is obviously an apprentice work; but
the composer already demonstrates his aptitude for characteristic orchestration,
and the melodic material is fine and sometimes considerably more than that.
The appearances of themes familiar from Swan Lake and 1812 are occasionally
perturbing, but it is interesting to hear them in what Tchaikovsky conceived
as their original context. The plot, insofar as one can make sense of it,
is far from dramatically cogent, a tangled web of jealousies and misunderstandings
with a rather contrived happy ending. Here the role of the people as the deus
ex machina who bring about the reconciliation at the final curtain harks back
to Glinka, and Tchaikovsky understandably finds it difficult to breathe much
life into the cardboard characters who occupy the foreground.
The performance, about which one can make judgements on the basis of the score,
is a very good one; Vladimir Matorin is excellent in the title role, and although
in the remainder of the cast there are some instances of the typical Russian
vibrato none of them are serious enough to be qualified as a wobble. The recording
is bright and over-engineered in the typical Soviet style, but everything
is clear and audible. The orchestral playing includes its fair share of watery
Russian horn style — particularly noticeable in the horn solo which
opens the opera — but this too is part of the idiom which one would
expect. Vladimir Kozhukhar clearly relishes the score, and obtains clarity
of ensemble even in the more complex passages.
Altogether then this is a most successful issue, torpedoed as so often in
the past by Melodiya’s abysmally poor presentation. It is valuable in
letting us hear Tchaikovsky finding his feet as an operatic dramatist; and
although the composer might not have wished us to examine this process in
such forensic detail, it can be regarded as an interesting historical document
in more ways than one. Might we now hope for reissues from Melodiya of other,
later and more characteristic, Tchaikovsky operas. I hope that they will come
with more helpful background information?
Paul Corfield Godfrey
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