Farewell songs – Culture – Kommersant

The world-famous mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Semenchuk presented two new large solo programs of Russian and French music at the Mariinsky-3. She performed the music of Glinka and Sviridov together with the pianist Semyon Skigin, and Berlioz’s opuses accompanied by a symphony orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev. Tells Vladimir Dudin.

Against the backdrop of the sharply thinned solo concerts of opera soloists over the past year – both at the Mariinsky Theater, and at the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, and in general in Russia – Ekaterina Semenchuk’s performances looked especially generous. Moreover, a little earlier, the singer gave the fans a demonstration of a large gallery of her heroines, going on stage in her favorite parts – Amneris in Aida, Azucheny in Il trovatore and Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s Macbeth, Laura in Ponchielli’s Gioconda, Lisa in “The Queen of Spades” by Tchaikovsky.

Ahead of the soloist, who is at the peak of her form, is a stormy summer season: at La Scala she will sing Lady Macbeth, in Munich – Amneris; there, at the Bavarian Opera, she, to the envy of Russian fans, should sing the part of Abigail in Nabucco for the first time, and at the Bayreuth festival she will make her debut in Wagner’s Parsifal. However, each of her performances, not necessarily her debut, is a challenge to routine and repetition, since none of them is like the previous one: you are especially convinced of this when she plays the role of bloody Lady Macbeth, finding more and more new angles both in vocals, as well as in drama. But still, along with opera achievements, Ekaterina Semenchuk is also known as a subtle interpreter of chamber music (in particular, in performances with the famous pianist Helmut Deutsch).

The chamber music program called “Offering to Petersburg”, in which the singer included the vocal cycle “Farewell to Petersburg” by Glinka and “Nine Songs to Blok’s Poems” by Sviridov, for some reason reminded me of an episode from the history of Soviet emigration, when a popularly beloved actress gives a farewell benefit performance before being sent abroad.

The last Sviridovsky encore brought tears to Catherine, which was accompanied by a deafening ovation.

In the music of Glinka, with which Semenchuk opened the concert, she showed how deftly she mastered various articulation techniques, from thin stylus, pastel shading and gentle salon watercolors (in romances like the textbook “Lark”, “Lullaby” or “To Molly”) to thick dense oil stroke of heroic-patriotic and ballad excerpts in “Knight’s Romance” and “Sleep, my faithful stormy horse.”

The final “Farewell Song” was performed by the mezzo-soprano with the pianist in such a poppy, dashing manner, as if it were not written by Glinka, but by Alexandra Pakhmutova. With a perfectly aligned, timbre-balanced voice, the singer played with the showiness of each register: the sensuality of the low contralto, the sincerity of the middle, the fragile crystal of the high. The pianist furtively shaded with elegant irony the heartfelt impulses of Russian sentimentalism.

In nine songs by Sviridov, to the words of Blok, the poet, in the language of symbolism, described the feeling of gnawing melancholy and hopelessness, saying goodbye to the beautiful era of the Silver Age. Here, in addition to the theme of farewell to the city and friends, the theme of death was added – after the sketches in the salon album, the images of Filonov and Petrov-Vodkin were already seen in “Our Lady in the City” and “The Bride”. Next to the Christian Mother of God “Satisfy my sorrows” the pagan “Mermaid” was adjacent to “look into each other’s dead eyes.” And the sensations of a “dark, stuffy room” resonated with the cantata “The barca of life got aground,” performed for the first time after the restoration of the composer’s manuscript.

Ekaterina Semenchuk exemplarily articulated Blok’s word, singing the existence and melancholy of the Soviet intellectual, who is looking for a way out of the dull flat horizontal into the vertical. The lapidary texture of Sviridov’s accompaniment created ideal conditions for this.

Together with Valery Gergiev, the singer chose a program dedicated to Hector Berlioz. After the “Roman Carnival” overture, she continued to say goodbye – now on behalf of the legendary Egyptian queen, already with life – in the full harmonic excesses and rhythmic whimsicalities of “The Death of Cleopatra”. After that, in the romance of the abandoned Margarita from The Condemnation of Faust, she took the audience into the sphere of quiet otherworldly dynamics. She methodically urged lovers of loud operatic vocals not to be blinded by the crackling brilliance, but to listen to the silence of the inner dialogue.

The jubilant aria of the reckless Ascanio from the opera “Benvenuto Cellini” for a moment returned to the Italian sun of life, after the agonal flash of which everything again returned to “talks about the other world” in the meditative “Vision of the Rose” with the lines on the tombstone: “Here the rose sleeps, and this rose all kings are jealous.” With the grandiose scene of the death of Dido from The Trojans (“I will soon die, plunging into immeasurable pain. Die without revenge!”), Semenchuk put an impeccable dramatic end. And she did not require a lot of applause to please with an encore from her golden repertoire: “Tears” by Charlotte from “Werther” by Massenet and the second aria of Delilah from “Samson and Delilah” by Saint-Saens (in which, according to the singer, not beauty, but death is poured , carried by the heroine to Samson) was opposed by the undying Habanera from Carmen.