Hearing as refined and lustrous an orchestra as the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra play Tchaikovsky’s magnificent score is a treat in itself. The recording is taken from a series of semi-staged performances of The Queen of Spades that Mariss Jansons conducted in the Munich Gasteig last October. The cast is an entirely Russian-speaking one, but it’s certainly a bit of a mixed bag. There is sometimes a pinched quality in the upper registers of Misha Didyk’s Hermann, though his confrontation with Larissa Diadkova’s terrific Countess (beautifully paced and detailed by Jansons), is impressive and never topples over into hysteria; Tatiana Serjan’s Lisa seems rather hard-boiled and squally. The best of the rest is Alexey Markov as Yeletsky, who sings his great second-act aria with just the right mix of ardour and honour. But uniformly convincing recordings of the last of Tchaikovsky’s Pushkin operas are few and far between, and the pluses definitely outweigh the minuses in this one.
