Léirmheasanna Táirgeadh san am atá caite
6The singer who made the biggest impression was Hubert Francis in the role of the slippery boyar Prince Shuisky. Rolling his tongue around the Russian text with relish, he presented exactly the extrovert characterisation required. His manipulation of Boris, informing him of a Pretender to the throne, was deliciously wicked.
”Anush Hovhannisyan molasses-rich soprano and Yuriy Yurchuk’s vehement baritone were ample compensation in this deeply satisfying performance.”
”The spectre of man’s death hangs over the final movement, a Lento lugubre (‘The Mournful Iron Bells’), and it fell to the Ukrainian baritone Yuriy Yurchuk to take us to its closure. Although this work ends in a kind of solitude it has to go through catastrophe to get there. A wonderfully austere lamentation on the cor anglais preceded Yurhcuk’s devastating first entry – with Kochanovsky uniting the gloom-laden chorus, bereft baritone and harrowing-sounding orchestra towards the Dies Irae. Yurchuk sang with solemnity, and a rich emptiness; the chorus a depth of wordless power to evoke the bells. The resignation at the end had the hollowness of profundity to it.”
The tenor Kang Wang could almost be said to have been cruelly cast in a role like The Drowning Man, who proves murderous when he stabs The Deer of Nine Colours – only to find that he, too, as his own karma, will die and rot beside the deer he has killed. His voice was intensely beautiful, and its scope was breathtakingly powerful in how far he could use it. In no sense is this voice a small one; there’s no strain to it and he can hold a note – and tail it off – magnificently. There was nothing linear about this singing, rather it was taken in a broad long arc; the care for detail was ear-catching. Singers don’t often become distractions for me in concert performances but Kang Wang did – and only in a very positive way
Petrenko’s, her Salome vibrates with ill-suppressed violence and traumatized rage, playing with the dawning knowledge of her own erotic power.
Like grizzly bears returning to prowl the tundra after months of hibernation, two of Britain’s most eminent interpreters of Bach’s sacred music went head to head on Good Friday. In The Oxford corner, John Eliot Gardiner brought his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists to the Sheldonian to stream Bach’s St John Passion. In the London corner, the atmospheric Battersea Arts Centre — its walls still marked by the fire that swept through it six years ago — was the venue from where Mark Padmore and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (in co-production with Marquee TV) decided to stream . . . guess what? Bach’s St John’s Passion.
