Saturday's concert in honour of Alexander Anissimov was a festive occasion. The NSO responded magnificently to the direction of its soon-to-be conductor emeritus in flamboyant but always rhythmically and dynamically controlled performances of overtures by Verdi, Glinka and Bernstein. The Thieving Magpie overture, played in big-band style, gave the horns some trouble, but everybody was on top form in a taut, tingling account of Ravel's Bolero.
The conductor was every bit as persuasive as accompanist to the soprano Galina Gorchakova and the baritone Sergei Leiferkus. Gorchakova has developed a facility with spinto that served her well in arias from the verismo repertory of Puccini, Cilea and Leoncavallo. She has nearly all the equipment in terms of solid tone and long phrasing for the two Leonoras in Verdi's Il Trovatore and La Forza Del Destino. But on this occasion, she was unable to achieve true pitch on her highest notes.
Leiferkus was the evening's other star. He may lack the ideal Italianate timbre for Verdi, but he compensates with sharply focused incisiveness, rock-steady line and immaculate diction. His strong theatrical sense saw him differentiate vividly between the malevolence of Iago in Otello, the gloating of Luna in Il Trovatore and the despair of the broken king in Macbeth.
Better still was his authentic way with the three Russian offerings. Again, there was clear distinction between the heartbreak of the sexually-betrayed protagonist in Rachmaninov's Aleko and the smugness of Tchaikovsky's Onegin.
He crowned his programme with a virtuoso account of the adventures of Mussorgsky's incorrigible flea.
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