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RECITAL REVIEW
December 5, 2004
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By Stephanie Friedman
Ekaterina Semenchuk, the marvelous mezzo from Minsk, gloriously defies the usual descriptions. It is useless and inappropriate to speak of her singing in terms of dynamics, diction, pitches. When she sings Russian songs, any listener with a Russian soul (one is writing this review) is riven. Semenchuk's voice is her soul and must be listened to, not with the ears but empathically, with a hearkening soul. It needn't be a soul of the same nationality: the polyglot audience at Hertz Hall Sunday afternoon knew what they were hearing and sat forward in their seats as one body, ever eager to hear more.
Now, Semenchuk is very young — 27 or 28. It is early in her career, though she has already had major operatic roles thrust upon her. And she was singing a program made up entirely — with the exception of one encore in French — of Russian art songs. Her vocal instrument, buttressed by the tutelage of the Gergievs — the conductor Valery and his sister, Larissa Gergieva, Semenchuk's sterling accompanist for the program and the one who discovered the singer — is as natural and unstoppable as a mountain stream. Her voice is thrilling: one moment it warbles and catches, as if a powerful bird had taken up residence in her throat; the next moment she is riding along a carefully hewn steel-reinforced thread of beautiful tone; then she unleashes her entire vocal strength, the voice engorged with sound. This is the voice of a fearless young singer in love with song. The opera world, which she is eager to inhabit, has not yet bound her wide-ranging talent with its particular strictures, circumscribing and perhaps — though one hopes not — altering and reshaping it.
For the moment, however, she is to be cherished for the natural song-singer that she is: possessing so many layers to her voice, so many variegated strands of color and character — whose number she augments or decreases according to her deepest impulses — that the loss of their rich possibilities would be a great loss indeed.
Semenchuk's rich voice and deeply-felt emotion met the corresponding richness of the 19th century Russian art song, amply represented by Glinka, Arensky, Kalinnikov, Tchaikovsky, Cui, Borodin and Mussorgsky; and the result transformed what might have appeared at first to be too monochromatic a program into an exhilarating voyage of discovery. Simply put, anywhere Semenchuk wanted to go, her audience, recognizing that they were hearing a rare vocal phenomenon — perhaps one that comes along once in a generation — followed like devoted disciples to her art. All the songs were lovingly done, but there were some outstanding moments, a spellbinding “On the old burial mound” and a stirring “Bells,” by Kalinnikov, among them. The masterful offerings of Tchaikovsky ranged from the dramatic “Only you” to the humorous “Kukushka” (Cuckoo), which invited some serious mugging from the singer on the dozen or so repetitions of “kuku.” The performance could have been even better if the singer had lent a fuller characterization to that troublesome bird's not-so-innocent inquiries after the success of those much-favored “other” birds — the nightingale, the lark, and the thrush. Needless to say, the cuckoo was not among those praised by the townspeople, according to its interlocutor, the starling; hence, the elongated outpouring of now impotent, now outraged “kukus.” César Cui's simple and beautiful “The statue at Tsarskoye Selo” was stunningly realized, and Mussorgsky's three offerings ran the gamut from a passionately heartrending “Forgotten” to the brazenly humorous “The Magpie.”
But the most unexpected, and striking, treasures were to be found in Semenchuk's performance of 20th-century songs. Georgy Vasilevich Sviridov's “The fiancée,” arch and deliberate, could almost have been written by Poulenc, and “The weathercock” was bitter, defiant, and somehow heartbreaking. What the deeper tragedy of “my little tin cockerel” might have been was not clear from the text — or its translation — but Semenchuk's interpretation left no doubt of its existence. M.L. Tariverdiyev's “Listya” (Leaves) was a tour de force for both performers. Gergieva evoked dead leaves with a delicate ruffling of the keys, while Semenchuk penetrated to the core with straight-tone exclamations and spine-tingling, unearthly melismas. The final songs of the program were two renderings with the same title, “She who suffers,” by V.R. Gavrilin, who died only five years ago. The first song was sung with “popular words.” It was, again, eerily melismatic; it was as if the downward cascades of incisive melismatic strokes were capable of killing the faithless lover. The second song was unbearably heartrending in its circling, almost hypnotic account of a girl picking flowers in her garden while suffering the torture of an absent lover. Both songs scraped the soul and caused tears to erupt that would not stop: mine, not the singer's. Semenchuk and Gergieva, consulting onstage, chose Falbinov's “How Beautiful are Your Eyes,” Kirill Molchanov's “Romance,” and Zara Levina's “Beautiful Eyes” for their Russian encores. Finally came Charlotte's aria from Massenet's Werther , sung passionately in a French that remained too far back in the singer's mouth and therefore might have been taken for Russian.
(Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, is retired from more than three decades of singing in opera and concert, here and abroad.)
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Ekaterina Semenchuk