What a complex, sophisticated and absorbing score this opera is; there
aren’t too many other recordings but most collectors interested in Russian
opera will know the classic 1950 Melik-Pashaev mono version with Ivanov and
Kozlovsky and the live Wexford Festival performance from 1994 on Naxos. The
former is great but cannot compare sonically with later recordings and the
latter has the advantage of full tracking cues both in English and with a
Russian transliteration of them, plus a full, English-only libretto.
This Melodiya set, issued for the first time on two CDs in a neatly
packaged, cardboard fold-out case, remains the best all-round recommendation
but has only a synopsis. It is a definite advantage to have access to the
full text, which is indebted to the original poem by Mikhail Lermontov, so I
found myself referring the Naxos libretto while listening to this as the
words are often moving and poetic.
This is the complete score and some twenty minutes longer than the Wexford
version which cuts the men’s and women’s dances in Act 2. Otherwise, I would
not rush to buy this if you already have that Naxos recording. Despite being
performed in Ireland, it features a Russian conductor and five native
Russians in the principal roles plus the ethnically Russian, Russian-
speaking Canadian Alison Browner as the Nanny – and all are excellent. In
some case, the soloists in Wexford are even preferable to those in this
recording: the tenor of Valery Serkin as Prince Sinodal is decidedly sweeter
and more ingratiating than the very nasal, constricted, albeit very
“Russian” sound of Alexey Usmanov. I prefer the fuller sound of the young
Maria Mescheriakova to the typically rather strident soprano of Nina
Lebedeva. She brings a very vibrant, slightly tremulous sound to her
characterisation of Tamara; Mescheriakova is steadier but both make much of
Tamara’s Romance.
Both recordings field two superb leading baritones: Anatoly Lochak is very
fine but Alexander Polyakov is even better. Even though his top Gs sometimes
strain him; he brings such intensity to the Demon’s two big arias, no wonder
that music was taken up by Chaliapin. Polyakov’s warm, grainy, seductive
tone brings out all the intriguing ambivalence of the Demon’s persona. He is
a baritone in the great tradition of Lisitsian, Mazurok and Leiferkus:
ringing and weighty with an edge apt for conveying desperation. There are
also two excellent basses in the smaller roles of Gudal and the Old Servant,
who have some really lovely music to sing, such as the arioso “All
Christians are asleep” in the Entr’acte between Acts II and III.
Russian opera often calls for especially rich-voiced mezzo-sopranos and
altos, too, and both Nina Grigorieva as the Nanny and Nina Derbina as the
Angel have strikingly beautiful voices, even if the latter is just
occasionally a bit plummy compared with Wexford’s Browner. The male voices
of the choir are stupendous, bringing real weight and excitement to big
numbers like the lovely “Nighttime” (CD 1, track 10) and “Do not weep” (CD2,
track 4), surrounded by a halo of reverberation, comes across as the Russian
equivalent of Puccini’s “Humming Chorus”.
Even if this Melodiya recording, despite being recorded in Moscow in 1974,
is not therefore necessarily more authentically Russian, in terms of both
recorded sound and performance it is considerably more atmospheric than the
live Wexford performance. That is apparent from the very opening bars of the
thrilling, scurrying Prologue. The studio recoding has an appropriately
darker, more spacious and reverberant ambience suggestive of epic events
played out on a much larger scale than the cleaner, more detailed but
somehow more restricted sound at Wexford, which is also afflicted by
inevitable stage noise.
The climax of the opera is the great duet between Tamara and the Demon in
a dénouement which is so much more effective than the end of Gounod’s
“Faust”. Comparisons are apt, too, especially in the Prologue, between
Boito’s “Mefistofele” with its massed, angelic choirs; clearly Rubinstein
achieved here a wholly successful fusion between the musical idioms of both
East and West. The conducting under veteran Boris Khaikin is wonderfully
free and fluid, the elucidation of those Russian rhythms and orchestral
colours being second nature to him. It is a mystery why such a colourful,
dramatic and artistically coherent opera, which was a triumph from its
premiere in 1871 and was praised even by The Five, Rubinstein’s ideological
opponents, should continue to await performance in modern theatres while
gothic dross like Meyerbeer “Robert le Diable” continues to be staged.
Ralph Moore
