Recovering the Forgotten Singer, 6: Yevgeny Nesterenko

Russian bass Yevgeny Nesterenko (1938-2021) was one of the phenomenal singers the U.S. discovered in 1975 during the first New York visit of the Bolshoi Opera. His Boris Godunov was a highlight of a several-week visit that introduced a generation of Soviet stars, among them Elena Obraztsova, Yuri Mazurok, and Vladimir Atlantov, many of whom went on to international careers.

Soon after winning a first-place prize in the 1970 Tchaikovsky competition, Nesterenko joined the Bolshoi as its leading bass. The Moscow company remained his home for three decades. At the Vienna State Opera and at La Scala he performed the principal roles of the core repertoire written for his voice type.

Nesterenko’s dark, rich timbre, the ease and strength he commands throughout his range, and the power and subtlety of his acting are fully deployed, as you will see, in the death scene of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. The czar’s tender farewell to his son is the inexorable denouement of this tragic history play. Our clip is drawn from a 1978 Bolshoi performance.

Here is the bass’s lyric interpretation of his Act III aria from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. In this commercial recording the mature Prince Gremin voices the depth of his love for his young wife, Tatiana.

Nesterenko was one of the leads in La Scala’s 1978 revival of Verdi’s Don Carlo, conducted by Claudio Abbado. A recording of that production is excerpted here. The singer’s heartrending delivery of “Ella giammai m’amò (She Never Loved Me)” conveys the despair of King Philip as, alone on the stage, he comes to understand that his love for his consort, Elisabeth of Valois, has never been requited.

After his retirement from the opera stage and the concert hall, Nesterenko pursued an active teaching and scholarly schedule until his death from COVID-19.

We encourage readers of this blog who share our enthusiasm for this very great and largely forgotten artist to access YouTube clips of Nesterenko in arias by Mozart, Rossini, Borodin, Puccini, and songs by Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich.

Rusalka and the Slavic Revival

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In the wake of the seismic geopolitical shifts of the late 1980s, the collaboration with the unstoppable Russian maestro, Valery Gergiev, who for a decade, 1997 to 2008, was principal guest conductor at the Met, and the tide of Eastern European singers, finally allowed to flow freely into the United States, the map of the Met’s repertoire was redrawn. Between 1990 and 2014, and especially under general manager Joseph Volpe (1990-2006), the Slavic project premiered eight Russian and Czech works: Janáček, Kat’a Kabanová, The Makropulos Case, From the House of the Dead; Shostakovich, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, The Nose; Prokofiev, The Gambler, War and Peace; Tchaikovsky, Mazeppa. Eight others were reintroduced and/or more regularly revived: Borodin, Prince Igor; Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades; Janáček, Jenufa; Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina; Smetana, The Bartered Bride; Stravisnky, The Nightingale. Such was the astonishing musical turn towards Eastern Europe.

Our subject in this post is Rusalka (1900), which will be presented “Live in HD” on February 25 in a new production. Its composer, Antonín Dvořák, known primarily for his orchestral and chamber pieces, also left a corpus of ten operas, of which Rusalka is, by far, the most often performed. This fairy tale work was first produced at the Met in 1993 and has had five revivals since. It has proven to be the most popular of the Slavic novelties, due perhaps to the first interpreter of the title role, Gabriela Beňačková, and then to the affection of Renée Fleming for the part. At Beňačková’s Met debut, the Wall Street Journal went out on a long, justifiable limb: “This is the most ravishing voice in the world.” Beňačková won all hearts with Rusalka’s apostrophe to the moon. Here she sings the exquisite melody in a 1988 Prague concert.

At Rusalka’s Met premiere, Dvořák’s aria was already familiar to many in the audience. They had heard it as a recital showpiece favored by lyric sopranos. A transcription of a 1950 San Francisco concert conducted by Pierre Monteux preserves for subsequent generations the wondrous timbre and the soaring ease of Dorothy Maynor whose public appearances were confined to the concert halls of Europe, and the U.S. and Latin America. An African-American artist, she was excluded from the operatic stages of her native country.

A few words for those unacquainted with the libretto. Rusalka, a wood nymph, has fallen in love with a prince who swims in her lake. She addresses her desire to the moon in her Act I aria, and begs a witch to transform her into a human being. In exchange, Rusalka is obliged to renounce the power of speech. The Prince arrives, falls in love, and carries her off to his castle. But by the time of the wedding he tires of his silent betrothed and betrays her with a Foreign Princess. In the final act, Rusalka returns to her lake and regains her voice. The repentant Prince begs for a last kiss, knowing that it will kill him. Rusalka reluctantly grants his wish, and mournfully sinks into the depth of the water. Here is their final duet sung by Kristina Opolais (the Met’s current Rusalka) and Czech tenor Pavel Cernoch, who is at present scheduled for a Met debut.

Remembering Elena Obraztsova

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This past January, noted Russian mezzo-soprano Elena Obraztsova died in Leipzig at the age of 75. 

 

Obraztsova made her debut as Marina in Boris Godunov at Moscow’s Bolshoi Opera in 1963. Her international career took flight with the Bolshoi’s tours to Milan and Montreal, and then to New York and Washington in the triumphant summer of 1975. It was then that American audiences experienced the revelation of Soviet artists native to the culture singing Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev in the original language. Among those who made the strongest effect were bass Evgeny Nesterenko, tenor Vladimir Atlantov, baritone Yuri Mazurok, soprano Makvala Kasrashvili, and Elena Obraztsova. It would be Obraztsova who would rack up the greatest number of Met performances, thirty from October 1976 to April 1979, a brief period of détente that allowed artists from the U.S.S.R. to appear with American companies. This hiatus in the Cold War came to an end in 1980 when Washington suspended talks with Moscow on cultural exchanges as one response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Obraztsova continued her international career on the opera stages of Europe and South America. She was one of very few Soviet singers who were granted permission to return to the Met in the 1980s until perestroika opened the doors to so many wonderful artists from Eastern Europe. The privilege of travel she enjoyed has been ascribed to her willingness to cooperate with the then Communist regime.

During her early seasons at the Met, Obraztsova sang the principal dramatic mezzo roles of the Italian and French repertoire—Amneris, Eboli, Azucena, Carmen, Dalila. Only in her last performances with the company, in 2001 and 2002, when she took on character parts in Prokofiev’s The Gambler and War and Peace, did she sing in Russian. Met audiences were therefore deprived of the great Russian roles in which she excelled, Marina and Marfa, though the company staged both Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

We interviewed the diva in June 2001 at the Barcelona home of Gloria Vilardell, her agent for Spain. We asked her why she had not sung Marina and Marfa with the Met. “I don’t know. I sing Boris in the Rimsky-Korsakov version. Now, everyone does the Shostakovich version, which I don’t like. Do you know why I am angry about this new fashion? . . . When Rimsky orchestrated Mussorgsky’s music, he knew what he was doing. The two of them shared a room. Who knew better—Rimsky or Shostakovich?”

As the clip that follows makes palpable, Russian music and text shows off Obraztsova’s rock-solid, fully resonant, opulent lower register. Here she is as Marina, a Polish noblewoman, blandishing her most voluptuous tones as she declares her love to the false Dimitri, the pretender who has pledged to usurp the throne of Russia’s Czar, Boris. The tenor is A. Tolstoukhov.

In Khovanshchina, the incantatory Act II aria of the religious fanatic Marfa predicts the fall of the progressive Prince Golitsin. The depth of Obraztsova’s organ-like timbre matches the gravity of the mystic’s divination. This is an excerpt from a 1980 Tokyo concert.

Obraztsova’s Carmen was celebrated everywhere. The Vienna State Opera mounted a prestigious new production for her in 1978, staged by Franco Zeffirelli, conducted by Carlos Kleiber. Here we see her in Act I. Carefree, playfully seductive, spins the elegant line of the “Habanera” with its wonted lightness and grace.