It was a "dream on a summer's night", to take a cue from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Accompanied by Daniel Barenboim, Anna Netrebko invited her audience to an intimate musical soirée "in the still of night" in Salzburg on 17 August 2009. Her recital was devoted to the songs of her Russian homeland and featured romances by Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. In the western world this type of repertory is still regarded as highly exotic, but following the success of her Russian Album with its highlights and rarities from the worlds of opera and orchestral songs, this seemed a logical step for the singer to take. After all, Anna Netrebko brings to these works the natural authority of a native speaker, and at her Salzburg recital she had the support of an extremely sensitive accompanist in the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. The omens were good for an outstanding concert, and so it proved. The present live recording of the recital in Salzburg's Großes Festspielhaus is a happy reminder of that occasion for all who were unable to attend the concert in person.
With Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Anna Netrebko focuses on two of the principal exponents of the "romance", a specifically Russian form of art song created by composers such as Glinka and Dargomizhsky in the first half of the 19th century. The main reason for this golden age of the Russian art song was the tremendous outpouring of Russian poetry thanks to writers like Pushkin and Lermontov. Pushkin rapidly acquired a significance comparable to that of Goethe, Heine and Eichendorff for the German Romantics. For Rimsky-Korsakov, too, Pushkin's poetry remained his principal source of inspiration, more than twenty of his songs being settings of poems by Russia's national poet. Two settings are representative of the rest: On Georgia's hills op. 3 no. 4 and The line of flying clouds grows thin op. 42 no. 3.
Rimsky-Korsakov is rightly regarded as the upholder of a tradition that he raised to the highest level. Only outside the Russian-speaking world has he been reduced to a handful of orchestral works such as Sheherazade, The Flight of the Bumblebee and various (re)orchestrations of Mussorgsky's works that are now generally felt to be anachronistic. Anna Netrebko's championship of this little-known aspect of his output may therefore be seen not only as a timely attempt to expand the repertory but also as a way of restoring the composer's honour. Like his four fellow members of the "Mighty Handful" – the influential group of St. Petersburg composers that also included Balakirev, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Cui – Rimsky-Korsakov remained true to Glinka's tenets when writing his own romances: "It is the folk that creates music. We musicians merely arrange it." Schubert represented a similar folksong ideal at this period, as did Brahms at a later date. What this meant was not necessarily the composer's reliance on authentic folk mate-rials or popular melodies but above all a certain "folksiness", with melodies that lend themselves to singing. This lyrical immediacy, coupled with a high degree of cantabilità, finds particularly memorable expression in the miniature Zuleika's Song op. 26 no. 4 and in the opening number, What it is, in the still of night op. 40 no. 3, but most of all in It was not the wind, blowing from the heights op. 43 no. 2.
That the appropriation of a folk-like tone is in no way incompatible with compositional ambitions is clear from the delightful exoticism of Captivated by the rose, the nightingale op. 2 no. 2, which Rimsky-Korsakov seasons with augmented intervals and ends with a wordlessly meandering vocalise. All of this is even more true of the two songs that make up the op. 56 set: The Nymph is a Loreley transported to Russia, beguiling sailors with her singing and driving them off course, while even more sensuous is the sound world of Dream on a Summer's Night, in which a young woman abandons herself to the idealized image of a young man and at dawn no longer knows whether what she has experienced was a fantasy or reality. In both cases Rimsky-Korsakov provides the vocal line with a sophisticated piano part that not only creates its own curiously unreal atmosphere but also suggests an affinity with the incipient Impressionist movement.
This representative selection of romances by Rimsky-Korsakov is offset by a no less typical cross-section of songs by Tchaikovsky. This programming on the part of Anna Netrebko and Daniel Barenboim not only reveals the similarities between the two composers, it also exposes their fundamental differences. For Tchaikovsky, Glinka's folksong ideal played a far less significant role, with the result that from the very beginning his romances strike an emphatically subjective note that has something balladic and even operatic about it. Even more striking is the way in which the composer identifies wholeheartedly with the message of the poems, with the result that many of his songs are personal confessions. It is in this sense that the Heine-inspired song Why? op. 6 no. 5 becomes the anguished lament of a wounded soul.
The words of the song Say, when under shady boughs op. 57 no. 1 have undergone a similarly radical transformation. They are taken from a comedy by Vladimir Sollogub but have here become an ecstatic hymn culminating at the end of each verse in the key word "Love". Affinities with the theatre become even clearer in So soon forgotten of 1870, a moving portrait of the transience of happiness and dreams. There is undoubtedly an autobiographical element to this song and perhaps even a direct echo of the composer's unhappy liaison with the singer Désirée Artôt, whom Tchaikovsky even wanted to marry in 1868. The failure of this and all his subsequent relationships with women forced him to confront the problem of his repressed homosexuality, to which he was able to give expression, if at all, only in clandestine relationships. Two of his settings of poems by Aleksey Apukhtin attest to this dissimulation, more especially the song Amidst gloomy days op. 73 no. 5, which was written in 1893, the final year of the composer's life, and as such is more or less coeval with his Pathétique Symphony. None of these songs is a poetic description or atmospheric portrait but an impassioned appeal to an imaginary partner: "I passionately want to live again, to breathe through you and to love you!" The question as to the identity of the person to whom these emotional appeals were addressed becomes less important, of course, when they are illuminated by an artist of the stature of Anna Netrebko, who, sustained by the transfiguring power of music, brings a radiant intensity to the final message of Amidst the day op. 47 no. 6: "My thoughts, feelings, songs and strength – they are all for you!"
Christian Wildhagen