The recording’s Tatiana is Elena Kruglikova. Hers is not a notably warm or beautiful voice, nor one of wide timbral span—”livably attractive,” I guess we’d say. But it’s able to rise convincingly to Tatiana’s few notes above G (there’s one B-flat in the Letter Scene, and finally a B-natural at “Na vyek proshchai!“, on her final exit. The Letter Scene is written almost entirely in the octave between Fs, where the word-expression can be achieved without strain, and on the few but important descents into passaggio territory, culminating on the D-flats at the scene’s end, a welcome chest blend enters Kruglikova’s lean soprano to keep things firm. Ivanov (not to be confused with his contemporary Alexei Ivanov, also a baritone), is here using his excellent voice with great restraint; the aria is cool and elegant, with a heady piano F (interpolated) at the end, and he’s fully up to the final scene. Kozlovsky is so unlike any other singer that personal taste must play a large role in one’s reception. In this case, I don’t see how the Act 2, Scene 2 aria could be much better; earlier, the almost crooned lower voice and his notion of poetic sensitivity combine to carry Lenski’s personality too far into  preciosity, though there’s no challenging the mastery. Into the upper range at full voice, the tone acquires its usual tingling, centered ring, but there is relatively little of that in the role. Kozlovsky broke many rules stylistically and technically, but his longevity and versatility belie the seeming functional contradictions. Maria Maksakova is the Olga. She sang mezzo-soprano and even contralto parts (e.g., Orfeo, Marfa in Khovanshchina), but has always sounded like a middle-weight soprano to me. In the context of this recording, that’s fine, and she gives her Act 1 song its sprightly due.

I’ve taken a detour into this recording, and what I infer are its connections to Tchaikovsky’s original vision and Stanislavski’s studio production, because I thought I detected an effort by Timur Zangiev and his cast to create something similar with their revival of Deborah Warner’s Met production. And I would love to see a thoroughly rehearsed attempt at that, preferably with a well-executed orchestral reduction rather than piano, in an appropriate space—say the storied Al Hershfeld Theater (formerly the Martin Beck) on West 45th Street (seating around 1,400), where Moscow’s Novaya Opera brought their well-studied, decently sung production of Onegin in 1997—or any of the venues where our own small companies perform. The problem: this is the Met. Of course, Onegin’s international life has necessarily taken on grand opera proportions. At the Met in the late ’50s we had Lucine Amara, Richard Tucker, and George London in the main roles, with Rosalind Elias as Olga and Giorgio Tozzi as Gremin, and Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting and cobbling up thematic orchestral interludes to cover the long  breaks for scene changes. By 1975, the Bolshoi’s version came to town with Tamara Milashkina, a dramatic soprano who is the Aïda and Elisabetta of Soviet recordings of the respective operas singing Tatiana, along with Vladimir Atlantov (Lenski), Yuri Mazurok (Onegin), Alexander Ognivstev (Gremin), the pungent Tamara Sinyevskaya (Olga), and the magnificent Bolshoi orchestra and chorus, Fuat Mansurov on the podium—the perfect opposite of a Studio performance, often “operatic” in a generalized manner, but house-filling and sometimes thrilling. We don’t have the horses for that. But Onegin doesn’t work in the Met with Shetland ponies, however sensitive they may be. Opposite Grigorian and in place of Golovatenko as Onegin was a Ukrainian baritone, Iurii Samoilov, who’d been singing Schaunard in some of the Bohèmes this season. He revealed a moderate-sized, rather neutral-sounding baritone, had all the notes and the linguistic and stylistic basics in hand, and carried out the staging scheme (Paula Williams was the revival director) with intelligence and good bearing. A thoroughly professional job as replacement (on how much notice, I don’t know; perhaps he’d been scheduled as the cover), but not a major voice or personality being discovered.