The Kipnis voice was one of the most impressive basso instruments of the last century—not a basso cantante like Pinza’s, but a tiefer Bass, craggy and domineering, and of extraordinary range, equal to Pinza’s at the top end and more extended on the bottom one. It is impossible to hear a more complete rendition of the Lohengrin Prayer or the Parsifal Good Friday benedictions (among other excerpts) than his. In addition, his grounding in the arts of German song, marked by the soulful thread of mezza voce he was able to extract from his voluminous tone, have given us some of the most memorable recordings of the Lieder of Schubert, Brahms, and Wolf (for just a start, try the old coupling of Schubert’s Der Wanderer and Der Doppelgänger). By his Met years, the voice had lost something of its gong-like sonority, and at times had a mealy overlay or a tendency to spread. But there was plenty left of quality, calibre and range, and as with Pinza’s Italian, so with Kipnis’ Russian in terms of his voice’s sit and resonantal formation—and with this broadcast we are back to the increasingly rare practice of a protagonist singing Russian in an otherwise Italian-language performance.

Whenever on this wartime afternoon Kipnis is content to sing, or to declaim within the bounds of what I hear as tonal integrity and an authentically grounded motivation, I am of the faction of the convinced. The voice is massive and well-tuned, and in no way shy of the peaks—even the G-flat of the Monologue, of which he gives a distinguished reading throughout, is gracefully taken. As with Pinza, when Kipnis melts into his half-voice, we melt with it; with both these bassos, I was in tears over the beauty of their suspended piano singing in the Farewell. But I often have a problem with Kipnis’ interpretive predilections whenever he steps out of his operatic comfort zone (above all, Wagner). It surfaces in the ’42 broadcast of Don Giovanni, whereon his Leporello is paired up with Pinza’s Don^(I), and on the live Vienna excerpts from Faust and Don Carlo from the late ’30s. One would hope this would be mitigated in native-language material (shouldn’t that be his comfort zone?), but it’s not. It emerges as a laying-on of distended effects, of exaggerated vocal colors and gestures, as if they would of themselves produce an emotional response in us. But these are easily detected as empty bursts of energy, as if extremity were proof of authenticity. He tears at his voice with guttural grindings and teeth-gnashings, splayed-open bright vowels, an assortment of whoops and cunning snarls. Instructing Fyodor in the last scene, he sounds like a person of demonstrative temperament and high skill constructing a theatrical moment, whereas Pinza sounds like a man who knows he is dying and must say some things to his son. After an imposing statement of the Coronation Scene address, the passages of true eloquence in Kipnis’ work no sooner establish themselves than they are knocked aside by returns to rhodomontade, however greatvoiced. Nor can we, I think, attribute any of this to Russian Soul—Chaliapin apart, we can listen to Russian bassos from Reizen and Pirogov down through Petrov, all employing tactical solutions to problems of Mussorgskian interpretation that we may find more or less persuasive, without encountering quite this sort of thing. Other listeners may find it all less off-putting than I do, and none of these reservations negate the importance of the performance as an historical memento of a significant artist.