Middle Temple, London

27 February 2008

Sergei Leiferkus (baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)

“Julius Drake’s fiercely sympathetic but never overstated accompaniment...” The Times

Pyotr Tchaikovsky:
Sergei Rachmaninov:

What the critics say

Neil Fisher, The Times, 29 February 2008
4 Stars

If I tell you that the first of this year’s Temple Song recitals plunged us into a maelstrom of misery, please don’t take it as a criticism. For if you thought Schubert and Schumann’s terminal poets and forlorn millers were gloomy, when it comes to the Russians the moping is truly pathological.

So many thanks that our guide in the Stygian gloom of Tchaikovksy, Rachmaninov and Mussorgsky was Sergei Leiferkus, a pretty rare visitor to Britain these days. Perhaps part of the reason for that is that his grainy baritone is losing some strength on top and some depth down below. But then the power of Leiferkus’s voice lies in its crepuscular snarls and its imperious majesty.

And if we missed some lyricism most in the Tchaikovsky selection, then there was always Julius Drake’s fiercely sympathetic but never overstated accompaniment, rippling through It Was in the Early Spring, and teasing out scarlet threads of melody.

Otherwise there was only the delightfully depressing task of succumbing to Leiferkus’s slick theatricality. He knows how to pace Rachmaninov’s Fate to perfection, full of chilling leers and macabre glee, and set off by the insidious echo in the piano of Beethoven’s Fifth; the bitter religiosity of Christ is Risen prompted a lament of biblical proportions.

But it was in Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death that this all-you-can-eat banquet of melancholy found its logical, horrible conclusion. Maybe Leiferkus could have toned down the wandering, accusatory arm, but there was no mistaking the morbid malevolence that underscored every one of these four hymns to that nasty man with the scythe.