Galina Gorchakova: A Calendar of Song: The Eleventh Day of Christmas
A Calendar of Song: Eleventh Day of Christmas
Rather than choose something everyone will admire, I’ll offer something gorgeously problematic and, again, imperfect. This aria opens the final act of Borodin’s Prince Igor. Igor’s wife laments her husband’s long absence in war. (She is geographically somewhat ambitious: she’s in Putivl, in northeast Ukraine, but she addresses both the Danube and Dnieper rivers; the nearest stretch of the Danube estuary is 500 miles from Putivl. When she says her beloved is “across the sea”, she may be erroneous, as he probably set off to the east, inland from Putivl, or possibly south, to the land between Putivl and the Black Sea. But who knows? This is opera.)
The singer is Galina Gorchakova (b.1962 in Siberia – stress on the first and third syllables), who had a comet-like career in the 1990s, a protégée of the conductor Valery Gergiev in his early period at the Mariinsky Opera. In her late twenties and early thirties, she sang the killing role of Renata in Prokofiev’s opera The Fiery Angel in St Petersburg, London, Milan, and New York. Other roles in 1992-1996 included Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, Lisa in The Queen of Spades, the title role in Yolanta (all Tchaikovsky), Fevronia in The Invisible City of Kitezh (Rimsky-Korsakov), Leonora (both La Forza del Destino and Don Carlo), Tosca and Madama Butterfly (Puccini). Between 1992 and 1995, she sang at the Maryinsky (St Petersburg), Covent Garden, the Edinburgh Festival, La Scala, and the Metropolitan Opera House – I caught her in Leningrad (as I think it still was), Milan, Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Milan, in some cases by sheer good luck. Apart from Gergiev, she was conducted by Riccardo Chailly, Edward Downes, and Bernard Haitink.
Hers was a large voice, though I’ve heard larger. (Turn the volume up to imagine.) What was phenomenal was that many of its more powerful notes had a more literally visceral effect than anyone’s I’ve ever heard: you felt it powerfully in the middle of your torso. (I was relieved to read another critic writing that. I’d been wondering if that was my reaction alone.) I also found it an exceptionally glamorous voice. “Glamour” is a word I seldom apply to voices, but I noticed that in a 1995 New York Times review of her Butterfly Bernard Holland pointedly described her voice as not glamorous: see what you think. She could also handle more coloratura than you expected of a large voice (at an Edinburgh recital, she sang Leonora’s aria and cabaletta from Act One of Trovatore as an encore).
A central problem that was evident by 1993 was pitch, not in every role but often enough to be worrying. I also suspect that she did what singers and singing teachers described as expending her voice’s “capital” rather than singing only from its dividends. At any rate, by the time of a 1997 Wigmore Hall recital, she was fairly intolerably out of tune, and by the end of the decade her voice on records seemed to have lost much of its size and beauty. She was still singing earlier this century; some items on YouTube, if correctly dated, suggest she was singing better. But the big brief climax of her career as a top-league international soprano was past. I include her today because it was, often enough, glorious.
There are many tales of sopranos who lost their voices within a few years. The most legendary was Eugénie Falcon (1814-1897), whose career lasted five years, ending at age twenty-three. Yet she was never forgotten. Having created roles by Auber, Bertin, Cherubini, Halévy, Meyerbeer, and Niedermeyer, she left so blazing an impression that “falcon” became a standard French term of her kind of dramatic soprano with a strong lower register. She had become the Paris Opéra’s best-paid singer around age twenty-one, but simply ran out of voice in one performance two years later, and, despite a few attempts to return, never really regained her career.
People ever since have explained what went wrong with Falcon, as they’ve done with many other singers, sopranos in particular. That wise-after-the-event approach is a good way to talk if you want a voice to have longevity. There are at least three good reasons why Maria Callas’s voice declined, as it certainly did: I think they're all correct, but some insist that only one factor was involved. The pathos of Falcon’s and Callas’s efforts to return to singing remains great, whereas it’s wonderful to hear a singer who has maintained high standards for twenty or more years.
Still, isn’t it better to be a has-been than a never-was? There are some singers I’ve heard who were masters in husbanding their resources into their sixties without exciting me. The best recordings I have of Gorchakova are live ones from 1992-1993, in Tchaikovsky’s The Oprichnik (a concert performance at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, which I attended) and Borodin’s Prince Igor (a radio broadcast of a Kirov concert performance in Amsterdam), at ages thirty and thirty-one. They’re not on YouTube, though.
This studio performance comes nearest to reminding me of the glory of her voice, though the visceral impact is lost (whereas you can feel it in those live recordings). Listening to this, I can easily count her faults. She doesn’t make nearly enough of words; a proper use of messa di voce would make the opening note and others more eloquent; at least one note strikes me as flattish; and the final top note (a hard one) is rather a scream (and sharp). For artistry and diction (and pitch), for heaven’s sake go to the wonderful recording on YouTube by Natania Davrath (1931-1987), one of the too-few recording by that marvellous but too little-known singer and skilful linguist, who came from Ukraine, perhaps near Putivl itself, before moving later to Israel (and studying in New York with Jennie Tourel). (Hers is the definitive account of the complete Chants d’Auvergne.) Yet I can go from Davrath’s performance to Gorchakova and be grateful for both: the sheer splendour of Gorchakova’s voice still thrills me. Does it you? I also find this is an intoxicating aria, one I like to listen to with more than one singer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHSasgiZeeU
Prince Igor Act Four. The dry walls and a square in Putivl. The bells of the low belfry ring for evening service. At the rear of the stage one can see the walls of the castle and behind them, the Prince's residence. Early morning.
Jaroslavna is alone in front of the city walls.
Ach! Plaču ja, gor'ko plaču ja,
Slezy l'ju
Da k milomu na more šlju,
Rano po utram.
Oh, I weep, I weep bitterly,
I shed tears
And send them in the early morning
To my beloved across the sea.
Ja kukuškoj pereletnoj
Poleču k reke Dunaju,
Okunu v reku Kajalu
Moj rukav bobrovyj.
I will fly off to the river Danube
As a cuckoo flies.
I will dip my fur sleeve
In the river Kayala.
Ja omoju knjazju rany
Na ego krovavom tele.
I will bathe the prince's wounds
On his bleeding body.
Och! Ty, veter, veter bujnyj,
Čto ty v pole veeš'?
Strely vraž'i ty navejal
Na druziny knjazja.
Oh, wind, violent wind,
Why did you blow in the field?
You have swept the enemy's arrows
Toward the Prince's army.
Čto ne vejal veter bujnyj
Vverch pod oblaka,
V more sinem korabli leleja
Ach, začem ty, veter buinyj,
V pole dolgo vejal?
Why did you not blow, wind,
Up, toward the clouds
And rock the ships in the blue sea?
Oh, why, violent wind,
Did you blow so long in the field?
Pokovyl' trave rasveial
Ty moe vesel'e?
You scattered my happiness
In the thin grass.
Ach! Plaču ja, gor'ko plaču ja,
Slezy l'ju,
Da k milomu na more šlju
Rano po utram.
Oh, I weep, I weep bitterly,
I shed tears
And send them in the early morning
To my beloved across the sea.
Goj, ty Dnepr moj, Dnepr širokij
Čerez kamennye gory
V Poloveckij kraj dorogu
Ty probil,
Oh, my Dnieper, my broad Dnieper!
You carved your way
Through the rocky mountains
To the Polovtsian land.
Tam nasady Svjatoslava
Do Kobjakova polku
Ty leleial, moj širokij,
Slavnyj Dnepr, Dnepr,
Rodnoj naš Dnepr!
Glorious Dnieper, Our dear Dnieper,
You carried
The boats of Svyatoslav
To Kobyak's camps.
Voroti ko mne milova,
Čtob ne lit mne ro'kich slez,
Da k milomu na more ne slat'
Rano po utram.
Bring me my beloved,
So that I will not shed bitter tears
And send them to you, beloved, across the sea
In the early morning.
Och, ty solnce, solnce krasno,
V nebe jasnom jarko svetiš' ty,
Vsech ty greeš', vsech leleeš',
Vsem ty ljubo, solnce;
Solnce, krasno solnce!
Oh, sun, red sun,
You brightly shine in the clear sky.
You keep all warm, you caress all.
You are dear to all, sun,
Sun, red sun!
Čto že ty družiny knjazja
Znoem žgučim obo žglo?
But why did you burn the Prince's army
With your torrid rays?
Ach! Čtož v bezvodnom pole žaždoj
Ty strelkam luki stjanulo,
I kolčany im istomoj
Gorem zapeklo? Začem?
Oh! Why did you, in thirst, harden the bows
Of the archers in the arid field
And seal their quivers with fatigue
And sorrow? Why?
Here’s Davrath’s version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LhaDO5TuDA It’s legal to admire both. If Gorchakova’s voice does get to you, then also try her in Natalia’s arioso from The Oprichnik: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHSasgiZeeU . Her live Oprichnik performance made another critic and me turn to each other and say “a Russian Ponselle”. Ah memories.
I also choose her because she is a compare-and-contrast study to tomorrow's singer, though the two women were very different (and had never heard of each other when I compared them in print in 1995).
