This just isn't actually a music recital, for all that there’s a singer and a pianist on its cowl. “Small items of opera in a couple of minutes” is how the soprano Asmik Grigorian describes every of the Rachmaninov romances on this, her debut recital recording, and in these performances with Lukas Geniušas that’s precisely how they arrive throughout: 19 self-contained scenes that drip with drama. Maybe you'd count on no much less from such a stage animal as Grigorian, nevertheless it’s nonetheless gratifying to search out that her powers of expression are as fierce in entrance of the microphone as they're on the stage.
Her tone at its fullest, all velvet-wrapped metal, gleams with sufficient edge to chop by something a full-throttle Rachmaninov piano half can throw at it, and Geniušas doesn't give the impression of holding again; in Spring Waters, setting phrases by the Romantic poet Fyodor Tyutchev, there’s an exciting few moments because the surging piano torrents briefly threaten to overwhelm the voice. Quieter passages convey hints of vulnerability and a extra convincing tenderness than most singers of Grigorian’s energy can summon with out the voice shedding its poise.
Rachmaninov is a composer in whose work Geniušas has shone particularly brilliantly as a soloist; right here, as a duet associate, he’s simply soloistic sufficient, with an attentive ear for the element of what Grigorian needs to realize with the form of a phrase. The opening music, from which the disc takes its title, is a first-rate instance: Geniušas urges Grigorian on because the music surges upwards, then calibrates his assist be aware for be aware because the urgency ebbs and the melody descends.
That's the longest music right here and, written in 1912, the most recent. The programme, in a sequence chosen by the performers, ranges from among the Op 4 songs Rachmaninov wrote as a pupil to his Op 34. Some final barely 90 seconds, however right here they nonetheless seem to be a scene reasonably than merely a music – a panoramic view, not a snapshot. Grigorian and Genušias will make you surprise why you don’t hear them extra typically.
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Is from one other brilliantly balanced partnership. Alina Ibragimova’s crisp violin enjoying strikes sparks off Cédric Tiberghien’s serene piano as they flip their consideration to Mendelssohn’s violin sonatas – the one he printed and people he left in manuscript. The latter an formidable mature work and a successful first attempt from the composer when an 11-year-old prodigy.
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