After these sessions, more than five years somehow passed before Chaliapin re-entered the recording studio, this time in St. Petersburg, in October of 1907. These were of course very unsettled years in Russia—1905 and ’06 were particularly horrible, with peasant strikes and armed uprisings, repression and executions (the upheaval referred to as The 1905 Revolution), and, in ’06, famine—and this may have dissuaded Gaisberg & Co. from venturing eastward. But Chaliapin had engagements in the West, too, so the inactivity still seems odd. In these sessions we already note an improvement in sound quality. These sides also include the first excerpts with orchestral accompaniment, conducted by a musician familiar to all collectors of early vocal recordings, Bruno Seidler-Winkler. Chaliapin’s first recorded crack at “Ave Signor” (Mefistofele) affords an especially good opportunity to check out what I mean by “gathered”: the attacked F at “Ah! [sì! Maestro divino],” etc. The tone on the open vowel is powerful but lean—not covered and not “awe,” but simply held closed, as if in parentheses. As he holds it, he needs to add nothing to intensify it for extra excitement; he doesn’t drive it intentionally sharp at the end, like his redoubtable successor Nazzareno de Angelis, or suddenly burst it open, as Battistini so often did without penalty (but then, he was a baritone). He just keeps feeding into it, with the merest hint of starting to do something more before dropping down to “sì!” In addition to Faust arias and the first Mussorgsky “Song of the Flea,” this session also gives us another take (there will be more) on the Koenemann song, this time concluding, unusually, with neither the “connected” mezza-voce nor the fil di voce, but with a floated head voice we can safely call falsetto.

Later that year, Chaliapin had another session for G&T, this time in Milan. It produced four of his remarkable unaccompanied Russian folk song recordings, three never issued on 78s, and the other unissued in any format till now. To characterize two of them, “Ekh ty, Van’ka” (“Crazy-headed Ivan”) and “Nochen’ka” (“Night”): these are mournful, modal-sounding songs, full of loneliness. In the first, a wife whose husband has gone away asks in whose care she has been left, and answers that it is that of her enemy, her father-in-law. In the second, the singer wonders with whom he can pass the time on dark autumn nights, and sings that since there is no father or mother, it will be a “dear sweetheart”—but he doesn’t sound consoled. The songs meander, fading and then re-starting through passages of cantillation, which Chaliapin colors not for any one-to-one word sense or out of any vowel-modulation technical need, but purely for emotional value, as if painting in sound. At one or two points a full-throated complaint emerges, and both songs are replete with subito-piano, fil di voce Ds and E-flats. One of these hangs a tic under before finding the pitch’s center; otherwise, the a cappella intonation is perfect. There’s no point in  analyzing art like this—it’s beyond that.