Me and J hit up the Lincoln Center Tower the other night after having consumed a considerable amount of Stoli and duck. We both nabbed the '94 Neeme Jarvi Mazeppa. I will tell you now that it is awesome. I was pretty into the Met cast, but this one more or less trumps it on every count. Except for Larissa Dyadkova, who is the same count. Galina Gorchakova is exceptional; Sergei Leiferkus has all the feeling of Nikolai Putilin but with no wobbling; and where the Met Andrey (I have forgotten his name) left so much to be desired, Sergei Larin proves this is a tenor role to be reckoned with and then some.
I still stand behind that production in general. However, listening to the recording makes me realize how lame the "they come back from the dead" ending was at the Met. Best to let that last, beautiful, awful, sequence end as simply as possible. They just die in the snow. It is somehow sweet. Curtain.
2 comments:
It's such a damn shame about Gorchakova. We listened to some of that Mazeppa the other night, and she sounds terrific. Meanwhile, over the next few years, she just kind of blew it out, gave some weird paranoid interview about how Gergiev wanted to ruin her, recorded a recital of Italian standards in which the high note in every one of them was a quarter tone flat, and last was heard singing Mabel in Pirates of Penzance at a dinner theater in Minsk. Ok everything but the last one is true.
And if everyone went to the same restaurant on the same night and ordered blintzes, there'd be chaos!
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