A recital of Russian songs might suggest too strong a dose of Slavic melancholy for a matinee during the holiday season. But when Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian took the stage on Sunday, Dec. 15, at UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall, the result was far from a Chekhovian downer. Her captivating performance with the excellent pianist Lukas Geniušas repeatedly conjured up goosebump moments of excitement.
Their program at Cal Performances — which they also delivered three days earlier at Carnegie Hall — was dedicated to songs by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff, each composer occupying one half of the recital.
Grigorian sang with exceptional vocal and emotional range. She floated high notes gorgeously and serenely — although at times one might have thought her a mezzo-soprano, intense and passionate as she is in her lower register. It was in the climaxes — and almost every Rachmaninoff song has such a moment — that Grigorian really sent her energy into the hall. Never overacting, standing poised and commanding at the curve of the piano, she delivered power shots of high tragedy and joy.
Grigorian has been a star in Europe for some time, winning Opernwelt’s Singer of the Year award for the second time in 2024. Just this spring, she made a widely acclaimed debut at the Metropolitan Opera as the lead in Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.
In 2022, Grigorian and Geniušas recorded a number of Rachmaninoff songs on an album titled Dissonans (Dissonance), a term that points not just to the famously jarring juxtapositions in Rachmaninoff’s harmonic language but beyond that, to dissonance as a way “to clearly feel and see the light of life,” as the soprano wrote in her liner notes.
This music demands virtuosity and range from singer and pianist. Grigorian strongly favors portamento (sliding between notes), which she used to great climactic effect on Sunday as her powerful voice hovered a split second, suspended just “off” the expected final note.
Geniušas, like Grigorian, moved nimbly across emotional ranges, from quiet introspection to sparklingly spinning passagework. As a collaborative pianist, he showed himself very much an equal dramatic partner. And in four solo pieces, he was compelling in his own right, particularly in performances of Rachmaninoff’s Preludes in G-sharp Minor and D-flat Major, Op. 32, Nos. 12 and 13.
The recital’s Tchaikovsky first half concluded with two stunning songs — “Blagoslovlyayu vas, lesa” (I bless you, forests), a rapturous celebration of nature, and the sharply contrasting “Ne sprashivai” (Do not ask), an anguished setting of a poem by Goethe about the pain of concealed emotions, something well known to the composer.
Among the many high points in the Rachmaninoff set was the spectacularly exuberant “Vesenniye vody” (Spring waters). Another song from the composer’s Opus 14 heard here was “O, ne grusti” (Oh, do not grieve), sung in the persona of a dead lover — at first with haunting lower-register ghostliness and then soaring, in the blink of an eye, to a passionate declaration of continuing love. A similar gesture turned “Zdes khorosho” (How fair this spot) from a deceptively simple pastoral to a cry of ecstatic mystical union with the divine.
The afternoon’s closer was “Dissonans,” a powerfully dramatic aria that lays bare the anguish of a woman remembering a lost love while caught in a possessive and probably abusive relationship.
The near-capacity audience seemed spellbound by these poetic and musical dramas, for there was barely an extraneous sound to be heard.
There were evidently many Russophones in the audience who needed neither printed texts nor translations. But for the rest of us, the program supplied eminently readable and poetic English versions by the late Colgate University professor Richard D. Sylvester, whose books about these composers’ songs are valued by music professionals and concertgoers alike.
