I thought I knew Olga Borodina’s voice pretty well. But then I discovered myself seated in second row center of Zellerbach Hall. Sitting that close to the Russian mezzo, the glories of her instrument were nigh overwhelming.
Even as she was on the mend from the audible and visible affects of bronchitis, Borodina’s voice radiated magnificence. In the low- and midranges, it has an all-encompassing Earth Mother fullness and warmth that’s hard to resist. On high, it blazes with such power that, even from the second row, it can be heard reverberating throughout the hall.
Olga Borodina
Borodina’s voice is also seamless and under impeccable control. She can swell from half voice to fortissimo and then back down with the same smoothness and lack of effort as you might experience in a car equipped with deluxe power steering. She possesses remarkable beauty throughout the range, and is completely secure up to at least a high B flat. Nor is her vocal beauty simply a gift of nature. From up close, the extent to which Borodina forms her sound through focused intention becomes clear.
Russian Darkness and Light
For her belated Cal Performances recital debut on Sunday, sung just two days after her final, take-me-out-to-the-ballgame appearance in San Francisco Opera’s Samson and Delilah, Borodina delivered a program of 10 Tchaikovsky songs followed by nine from Rachmaninov.
With this lineup, however, there was little danger of drowning in two hours of Russian suffering and angst. Yes, Tchaikovsky’s Net, tolko tot, kto znal (None but the lonely heart) was second on the program, but it shared the afternoon with any number of lovely songs about first love, first meeting, and love in springtime. Russian composers, it seems, pine and grieve in the dark of winter, but greet life anew as spring flowers burst into bloom.
Even during illness, with a runny nose and a countenance that could not totally mask how lousy she felt, Borodina radiated vocal health. Her sotto voce singing was perfectly formed, and all of one piece. When in Tchaikovsky’s Otchevo? (Why?) she asked, “Why is the earth all damp and gloomy like a tomb?” her entire being resonated with emotion. As she poured volume and feeling into the sleepless conclusion of Notchi bezumnyje (Crazy nights), she also brought a nurturing beneficence to Kolybel’naja pesnja (A lullaby). And while she did not use it often, she made a hollow sound as she concluded the first set with Tchaikovsky’s Snova, kak prezhde (I am alone again).
Although Rachmaninov’s music is hardly free of suffering, Borodina created a sweet bouquet amid the pain. Utro (Morning) evoked her sunniest warmth, Rechnaja lileja (The slender water lily) found her playful, while Siren (Lilacs) inspired the loveliest tones within her vocal pallette. Everywhere her pianist, Dmitri Yefimov, used his partially open Steinway to support her with great sensitivity.
Beauty in the Instrument
Borodina’s limitations, as it were, are paradoxically rooted in her greatness. Rather than focusing much attention on word painting, as done with such master art-song interpreters as Fischer-Dieskau, Schwarzkopf, Lehmann, Schumann, Ameling, and Teyte, Borodina relies far more on sheer vocal beauty and control. She clearly feels what she is singing, but communicates far more by sound than word. As a result, this listener came away from her performance touched far more by vocal beauty than transcendent insight.
Perhaps that’s why the audience chose to heartily applaud the recital’s conclusion without rising to its collective feet. An afternoon of beauty, yes. Rich with interpretive brilliance? Not really.
The sole encore was the big surprise. Not the music itself, “Mon Coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” from Samson and Delilah, but rather how Borodina caressed words and phrases in surprisingly subtle ways. In an aria she has sung many hundreds if not thousands of times, she managed to find something new and deeply communicative that had only occasionally surfaced in the songs that preceded it. It felt as if we were hearing this well-worn aria for the first time. The audience, recognizing something far greater than the wondrous, climactic high B flat that began softly before resounding in full glory, rose to its feet to cheer her on to recovery.
Jason Victor Serinus regularly reviews music and audio for Stereophile, SFCV, Classical Voice North America, AudioStream, American Record Guide, and other publications. The whistling voice of Woodstock in She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown, the longtime Oakland resident now resides in Port Townsend, Washington.
