Yes, we have taken down the New Year's Offenbach sound files. The world seems a bleaker and more goyische place. Hélas !
Well, let's all dry our pretty eyes and turn our attention to the superb Moscow-born mezzo-soprano Zara Doloukhanova. Like Giulietta Simionato, her approximate contemporary, Doloukhanova mastered a wide range of music, from works of the pre-Baroque era to the twentieth century. Both offered bracingly clean, straight-up singing, with none of the syrupy cooing, gurgling, and sliding that pass for distinguished vocalism today. (Can you tell that I finally toughed out you-know-who in the Met's Rodelinda? Oy.)
To my mind, Simionato had the lusher and more imposing instrument, while Doloukhanova's sound was silkier and more distinctive in color. A glamorous woman, in certain photos Doloukhanova resembles the eternally fabulous Rita Moreno.
Like Simionato, Doloukhanova was a crackling Rossinian in the post-Supervia, pre-Horne and -Bartoli dark ages. (Yes, I know, there was maestro Vittorio Gui, to say nothing of a certain Maria Meneghini Callas, but who besides cranks like me remembers them as Rossini interpreters?) By today's standards, Doloukhanova's Rossini can sound matronly and too sparingly ornamented, but I think that we would be much the poorer without it.
Here, then, for your pleasure and edification, Zara Doloukhanova and Galina Sakharova in the "Serbami ognor" duet from Rossini's Semiramide, recorded c. 1953. Update: Sound file no longer available. Please visit vilaine fille early and often! (Doloukhanova enters at 1:50 or so.) I commend to you, as well, the sound files at Nina Svetlanova's site and Victor Han's Great Russian Voices. (Do not miss the arias from Khovanshchina.)
Doloukhanova will be well represented in WHRB's Rachmaninoff Orgy®, starting Thursday, 13 January at 14h00 EST.
As far as I know, Doloukhanova is alive and well, painting and teaching at the Gnessin State Musical College. As for Simionato, who is 94, some wags whisper that she has taken up with a boy toy many decades her junior. I cannot vouch for this information, but you know what they say: Se non è vero, è ben trovato—and you go, girl!
Zara died on the 12-th of December 2007 after half a year in bed folowwing a broken hip - in a few months she would have reached the age of 90
Three days later I was present at the funeral organised by her nieces Karina and Rusanna Lisitsyan. Their mother Dagmara Lisitsyan (93) read by heart a long and beautiful poem by the coffin of her sister
Posted by: David Sarkisyan | 17 March 2008 at 00:40