A 1948 Soviet era recording of Tchaikovsky's The Oprichnik has been
issued as an MP3 download, available since November 2009 from sites like
ITunes and Amazon.com. As far as I know this performance has never been
released on CD. Back in 1966--encouraged by a rave review by John Osborne
in the magazine High Fidelity--I obtained the domestic release of this
historical recording on the label Ultraphone Records, which specialized in
rare Soviet pressings of Russian opera. Osborne also praised Ultraphone's
release of Khaikin's Maid of
Orleans, which has been since issued on CD by Myto.
Admittedly, Ultraphone's Oprichnik suffered from lower fidelity sound
than its release of The Maid, but at that time it
was our only window into this early, imperfect but powerful work. With
Alexander Orlov conducting the USSR Radio Symphony Orchestra, it boasts
some powerful singing, particularly from Dimitri Tarkhov as Andrei and
Ludmilla Legostaeva as Morozova; the trouser role of Basmanov is also well
sung by Zara Doluhanova. Natalie Rozhdestvenskaya--the mother of conductor
Gennadi Rozhdestvenski--sings the role of Natalia with a powerful
expressive voice that is perhaps compromised by the inadequate Soviet
recording technology, but, all around, this is perhaps the best
performance of this piece available these days, eclipsing most of all the
modern, live recording (on Dynamic) conducted by Gennadi Rozhdestvenski,
who had merely adequate soloists at his disposal. The 1980 recording,
conducted by Provatorov, still available from Aquarius Records, has a
stellar Natalia in Tamara Milashkina, but none of the rest of the singing
comes up to the standard set by the 1948 Orlov.
I still have my old Ultraphone LPs of The Oprichnik and The Maid of Orleans, and I was
skeptical that the current MP3 would offer any improvement over the sonic
difficulties of the
Oprichnik set, but I was pleased to discover that it does indeed
sound better. Distortions remain, of course, particularly with dense, loud
orchestration, but much of it is now surprisingly easy to listen to.
Especially gratifying is to hear Legostaeva riveting performance of
Morozova's aria in Act 2, which is followed by her sublime duet with
Andrei. Tarkhov's tenor voice is unusual to my ears; it has a plangent
quality not unlike Corelli's, and his commitment to this role is obvious.
The download is not cheap. Most sites offer it for $29.99, with Amazon
being the least expensive that I could find at $25.49:
http://www.amazon.com/Tchaikovsky-The-Oprichnik/dp/B0031IKIZU/ref=sr_shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1266159600&sr=301-1
Gordon Thomas