Yesterday a pleasant surprise arrived in the mail; a belated birthday gift, in the form of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's Sviridov album (thank you Mom!). Georgi Sviridov, who died in 1998, finished the song cycle Petersburg, a vocal poem for Hvorostovsky in 1995, using poems by Russian poet Alexandr Blok. I read some Blok in my Russian lit class last semester, including his bizarre short play The Puppet Booth. His poetry does not employ many words, but those he chooses are powerful, even if the poetry is obscure and difficult to understand. Blok was at the beginning of what is known as The Silver Age of Russian poetry (the Golden Age being that of Pushkin and friends), which produced many of the early Soviet poets. I can't believe it took me until this past year to discover these poets, and I wish more people would read them. In my class, many of the poems we read also included the original Russian text, which was a big plus for me. Sviridov makes platinum out of these already golden words, and Hvorostovsky's dark-chocolate voice brings them to life with pianist Mikhail Arkadiev.
Also on this disc are Sviridov's Six Romances to words by Alexandr Pushkin, written in 1935. Of course, Pushkin is a totally different poet than Blok, and his style reflects that. Pushkin belonged to the Romantic age and uses more flowery and beautiful language than Blok. This is the man, after all, who wrote Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades. "To Nanny" is especially beautiful.
My advice? Go out and buy this album. Now. Right now. Honestly, this album is so good it makes everything else he's done look like crap. It's that good.
2 comments:
I've got a few discs of Sviridov and I've got to admit I wan't much taken by the music, but then again, I'm not really often much in the vocal song mode. He wrote a series about a kite--how Long Shall the Kite Fly is what I think it's called. I'd be happy to send you the recording if you're interested...
I would most definetly be interested! Do you have my address? And thanks!
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