NEW YORK — “Astounding,” “fierce,” and “brilliant” are words applied to Asmik Grigorian as the Lithuanian soprano has come to dominate the Salzburg Festival and made American inroads earlier this year with an acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut in Madama Butterfly. And now: her Dec. 12 New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. But was that really her, dressed simply, jewelry free, humbly acknowledging entrance applause and maintaining a stationary presence in the crook of the piano? Yes, it was, in a program selflessly focused on revealing Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff songs, plus a few solo piano works.
Clearly, there are facets to her artistry that we’ll need years to fully know. Her rich Eastern European sound, which somehow never overwhelms words or goes into vibrato-overload, could be heard as mezzo as well as soprano. The much-discussed cutting power of her voice — she sings Salome — wasn’t employed for long stretches and wasn’t missed. So she has options and remarkable adaptability.
Grigorian and her collaborating pianist, Lukas Geniušas (a fellow Lithuanian with a bundle of competition prizes and an exciting solo artist on his own), projected well-defined and perfectly congruent personalities that created a coherent, imposing musical whole, especially in the Rachmaninoff half of the recital. “I don’t see Rachmaninov’s compositions as solely chamber music,” wrote Grigorian in the booklet notes for their duo album Dissonance on the Alpha label. “In terms of its technical complexity, each of his romances is akin to a small opera, a dramatic process. That is why these compositions require a real duo, not an accompaniment, and that’s why I knew Lukas would be able to achieve that.”
And achieve they did. Rachmaninoff songs can seem like piano pieces with added vocal lines, works perhaps headed toward a hybrid genre the composer never fully realized. But Grigorian’s linguistic authority with Russian art song — not heard since Galina Vishnevskaya — revealed the composer’s overlooked unanimity of purpose in words and musical gesture. Added to that, she didn’t just sing the wistful, nostalgic melodies in “Sing not to me, beautiful maiden,” Op. 4, No. 4, but created a persona that brought added dimension to the song. Songs that express themselves as soliloquies had a brighter tone to shape the words.
Poetic observations of the outside world were sung with darker, mezzo-ish tones, even creating an interesting interpretive counterpoint in “Spring Waters,” Op. 14, No. 11: The song’s surface is about the onset of spring, though Grigorian’s vocal color said the joy was wishful thinking for a long-off season. An even darker color made “Twilight,” Op. 21, No. 3, quite entrancing.
Each half had solo moments for Geniušas, whose clean, precise sound gave special articulation to Rachmaninoff’s Preludes, Op. 32, Nos. 12, and 13. You’d expect a racehorse moment with him bursting out of the gate. Instead, the preludes were a musical and temperamental bridge to the sentiments of the surrounding songs.
The Tchaikovsky set included the familiar “None but the lonely heart” and “Again, as before, I’m alone” but met these romantic sentiments on their own modest terms, which didn’t diminish the music in any way while allowing it to speak more directly. One could question Geniušas’ choice of two early Tchaikovsky works, Romance in F, Op. 5, and the discursive Scherzo Humoristique, because there’s much better solo piano music by this composer. But the Tchaikovsky half of the concert was established as something of a parlor performance — Zankel only has 599 seats — in an unostentatious approach that never diminished the music but changed the expectations of what the pieces said and were meant to accomplish. And in projecting music of a different place in time, isn’t creating the right expectations at least half of the interpretive artistry?
