Shostakovich’s Suite on Poems by Michelangelo has recently become a calling card for Dmitri Hvorostovsky and his pianist Ivari Ilja, and their recording is a notable addition to the handful of versions available. The work dates from the year before the composer’s death, when he was battling with arthritis and cancer; every note was an effort to write down, which perhaps explains why, in the piano part at least, he wrote so few. Hvorostovsky and Ilja capture the right degree of bleakness, anger and intensity. There is something of the iron fist in a velvet glove to Hvorostovsky’s voice here, and that velvet thins just often enough to reveal the edge beneath. His baritone may now be a touch too craggy for Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnets, but he and Ilja shape them stylishly, and in their warmth and relative sweetness they are a fitting foil for the Shostakovich.
