THE TIMES
4th July 2005
Included in the recently completed tour of seven Russian cities by Dmitri Hvorostovsky was his hometown of Krasnoyarsk. Since famously beating Bryn Terfel to become Cardiff Singer of the Year in 1989, the 42-year-old has had a glittering international career, travelling between the world’s great opera houses and concert halls.
But the celebrated baritone was worried.
“When I go borne I am totally out of date,” he agonised. “People even notice that I speak with an accent and use old slang. It’s very awkward.”
He shouldn’t have concerned himself. Screaming fans lined the streets, and one night as many as 80,000 people crammed into an open-air theatre to glimpse their favourite household name.
Fortunately, Hvorostovsky is good with attention. Voted one of People magazine’s ‘50 Most Beautiful People in the World’ in 1991, he is happy to be recognised for his appearance as well as his voice. “It certainly does work to my advantage,” he admits. In Japan and Korea, the majority of his audience are female and under 19 and concerts are advertised in teen magazines, something most promoters would jump through hoops for.
This month Warner Classics releases Hvorostovsky performing Mussorgsky’s haunting Songs and Dances of Death, recorded at last year’s Proms. Hvorostovsky plays the part of Death and each of the four songs shows death in a different way.
“It’s music that really gets into your bones. It’s probably one of the hardest song cycles written. Not just the music but the subject itself,” he says. He captures it with a potent blend of heady melancholy and drama, as revealed to a rapturous Carnegie Hall audience the night before we met.
Surely the most extraordinary occasion Hvorostovsky has sung the Mussorgsky was at the Beslan memorial concert at the ENO last year. “It was a hugely intense occasion to be singing about the death of a child. It was just a role but I felt very guilty to be singing such dark things. Sometimes you have to touch those human strings of sorrow. You have to feel the pain.”
The only child of two musical parents, Hvorostovsky was “obliged”’ to go into classical music at a young age. After music school, aged 14 his hormones rebelled and he joined a rock band called Rainbow, yearning to be like his idols Deep Purple and Queen.
However, it was only a few years until (much to his father’s rejoicing) it was the records of his new, Italian heroes, Tito Gobbi and Enrico Caruso, that were on the turntable. He had developed a great stage presence during his two years with Rainbow, but it was this obsession that got Italian pronunciation and singing right into his blood. With the encouragement of the legendary mezzo-soprano Irina Arkhipova, he entered the Cardiff competition. “Winning Cardiff was like a cold shower!” he recalls. Within weeks he had all agent and a record contract - and he still couldn’t speak English.
The music had changed but his youthful exuberance remained: too much vodka, chain-smoking, a brawl in Venice that resulted in a broken nose, plenty of strong will and a certain amount of arrogance. Various arguments with assistants and directors ensued, including one in 1992 at Le Chatelet in Paris. He wasn’t invited back until 2004.
Hvorostovsky’s second wife encouraged him to give up the hard booze and fags and there is no question that his voice has ripened in the four years since. Having sung many a Figaro, Don Giovanni and Onegin, a watershed came in 2002 when he did his first heavier baritone role, Rigoletto, at Houston Grand Opera.
Apart from Onegin (at Covent Garden in March 2006) he has several more meaty new roles coming up, including Renato (Un ballo in maschera) in November, also at Covent Garden, and his first Simon Boccanegra at Houston in October. There is even talk of Iago (Otello) in San Francisco.
Before all that London has the chance to see his Rigoletto in the David McVicar production at Covent Garden, which ruffled feathers when launched in 2001. Hvorostovsky is unperturbed: “There is a striptease, which is great. How are you supposed to do the orgy without the striptease?”
Since he’ll be playing the deformed court jester, the ladies will have to counter their disappointment by immersing themselves in his voice. That should be reward enough.
