Feb. 27--Lyric Opera used to present vocal recitals by some of its leading artists on a fairly regular basis, but those concerts have long since slowed to a trickle amid an increasingly commercialized classical music world in which few giants of this intimate musical genre now walk.
So the recital of Russian and German songs Dmitri Hvorostovsky presented with his regular accompanist, pianist Ivari Ilja, on Friday night at the Civic Opera House constituted a genuinely rare undertaking by the company, and a real event for local connoisseurs of the vocal art.
The reappearance of the celebrated Russian baritone at Lyric, where he made his U.S. operatic debut in 1993 but where he has not appeared since the 2007-08 season, drew a huge turnout of fans, many of them Russian-speaking, who packed the Ardis Krainik Theatre to welcome him back to the concert platform. Hvorostovsky took an extended leave from performing last year while he underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy for a brain tumor.
To judge from the strong reviews he garnered for his singing last fall at the Metropolitan Opera, his recovery has been fully successful; indeed, he looked and sounded in top form on Friday. With his sexy mane of silver-white hair, tight-fitting tuxedo and easygoing stage manner, the Siberian "barihunk" (as he has been dubbed in the popular media) had the crowd fairly eating out of his hands with a program that played to his strengths as an interpreter of his native repertory.
Well before his decades of fame as a Verdi baritone, Hvorostovsky made his name more in recitals than in opera, a fact borne out by the heartfelt sensibility and idiomatic authority he brought to groups of songs by Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. Few of these attractive songs are known to Western listeners and they are even neglected by Russian singers.
Yet it requires a native Russian artist with a musical understanding such as Hvorostovsky's to bring out the emotional weight of the Russian poetry through the music. The svelte sound evident in the baritone's 1999 Chicago recital has turned darker, and while it always had a burnished glow, it has taken on a wider range of expressive nuance and tonal shading.
There's now a deeper projection of the subtleties in Tchaikovsky's vocal writing, with its abundance of beautiful melodies that soared on Hvorostovsky's long-admired ability to sustain long phrases on a seemingly infinite column of breath, as witness the magical final line of "The Nightingale." Why these beautifully crafted vignettes (Tchaikovsky's song output stands at roughly 100) are not more often performed remains a mystery.
Even rarer are the songs of Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov, and the baritone's discerning selection of five Glinka and six Rimsky miniatures, sung with poise and passion and sensitively accompanied, told us a great deal about what we are missing. Glinka's Italian-infected melodic lines were especially striking here.
Unfortunately, the deep insights and firm idiomatic grasp Hvorostovsky brings to the Russian song repertory do not extend to Richard Strauss, or at least not to the five Strauss lieder with which he concluded Friday's recital. Interesting as were the dark colorations and heroic swagger he invested in the song "Caecilie," the readings were as a whole score-bound, the phrasing labored, the tonal weight heavy. Then, too, the singer's German diction was so thick it wasn't always recognizable as German.
Perhaps he should have skipped Strauss altogether and devoted more of his short program to Neapolitan songs, a lighter realm in which he's far more comfortable. He presented two such vocal gems as encores -- the well-known "Core 'ngrato" and "Passione" -- delivered in a robust, quasi-Italian-heartthrob manner that had the crowd up on its feet in an instant torrent of applause.
Hvorostovsky bade the fans good night with a heartfelt solo number, the Russian folk song "Farewell, happiness." Arms stretched wide as if to embrace the entire audience, he made this plaintive lover's cry feel like the epitome of Russian soul in music.
John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
jvonrhein@tribpub.com
