Dmitri Hvorostovsky is not averse to star power. The Russian baritone’s Celebrity Series recital on Sunday drew an audience primed for matinee-idol appeal; Hvorostovsky provided a dashing bearing (not to mention a fashion-forward, spangled-lapel frock coat-cum-smoking jacket). Confronted with a Sunday afternoon Symphony Hall crowd’s usual ambient cacophony — cellphones, chatter, coughing — he drew genial laughs with expressions of quizzical, playful petulance. At encore time, he deftly corralled sometimes rowdy appreciation with good-natured parental authority. The man can play to the crowd.
A vocal powerhouse with star power
But Hvorostovsky is also a serious musician and a serious singer. His sound is a singular thing, its dark core sensationally consistent all the way into its top. It’s full of lyricism and presence, falling like a rich shadow across every corner of the hall, the edges burnished and smooth. His superb accompanist, Ivari Ilja, provided amply elegant support: a lucid, restrained touch with a delicate glint, over slow-drifting floes of bass, weighty but fluid.
In four songs by Gabriel Fauré, Hvorostovsky largely relied on sound alone, his French murky, the text somewhat disconnected from the musical line. The result was technically impressive — the consuming regret of the bleak “Automne’’ and the agitated “Fleur jetée’’ rising to an imposing mass — but dramatically monochromatic.
But six songs by Sergei Taneyev immediately produced far more nuance via an adroitly varied intensity. The Russian texts teased out thoughtful phrasing, the language integrated into the sound rather than just layered over it. “Stalaktity’’ (“Stalactites’’) achieved a powerful slow burn. Hvorostovsky made subtle work of the faux-classicism of “Menuet,’’ arriving at its dark conclusion of revolutionary foreboding with wry, bleak understatement. “Lyudi spjat’’ (“The people are asleep’’), a delicate nocturnal assignation, was most finely etched of all, the elegant propriety of the craftsmanship framing moments of gentle, unexpected rapture.
Two of Franz Liszt’s “Tre Sonetti de Petrarca’’ were given full operatic scope, Hvorostovsky tapping into the high-tension wire of Liszt’s expansive line, Ilja matching with an orchestral depth of tone. Tchaikovsky’s Op. 73 Romances found Hvorostovsky in full control, conversational and exhortatory by turns, judiciously modulating between intimacy and power, his voice effortlessly enveloping the music and the hall.
The encores recapitulated those poles. Hvorostovsky brought a nefarious relish to Iago’s “Credo’’ from Verdi’s “Otello,’’ then counterbalanced with a restrained rendition of Rachmaninoff’s “In the Silence of the Night’’: showy and searching, with enough voice and charisma for either — or both.
Matthew Guerrieri can be reached at matthewguerrieri@gmail.com.
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