Not Just Any Voice, Perhaps the Voice

For a good half-hour, she sits at the maestro’s elbow, gazing out over the hall, dressed in royal blue, at attention. Above the low-cut neckline, her up-tilted face floats round and mask-like as a harvest moon. Five epic movements of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Alexander Nevsky” cantata come and go, grand frescoes in sound. In the hush after the apocalyptic battle on the ice, she rises, and her chant begins: “I shall go across the snow-clad field / I shall fly above the field of death / I shall search for valiant warriors, / my betrothed, my stalwart youths. . . .”

Her contribution lasts perhaps five minutes. The huge chorus thunders forth a triumphant finale. The audience jumps to its feet, but when the players rise, they turn to the singer and join the applause, as if her still elegy had lent a voice to a whole nation, and the tide of emotion that floods the hall channels into what feels most of all like a personal tribute to her.

Such was the scene at Avery Fisher Hall last week on Night Two of the ambitious new Lincoln Center Festival, and such it may be again in Los Angeles tonight, when St. Petersburg’s Kirov Opera Orchestra and Chorus close the first of five different concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. The woman in question is Olga Borodina, born and bred in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), today the lustrous figurehead of the Kirov, whose principal conductor and artistic director Valery Gergiev whisked her from the conservatory into the company nine years ago, her studies not yet complete.

“You don’t need too much voice to sing what I sing in ‘Alexander Nevsky,’ ” Borodina said over coffee in Manhattan last week, exuding a relaxed merriment in contrast to her self-possessed hauteur on the concert platform. “You need your heart.”

That may be, but Borodina’s rich, ravishing mezzo-soprano is regarded as one of the glories of the age. Gergiev threw her into the demanding role of the prophetess Marfa in Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” over her own strenuous protest.

Was it too heavy a part for a voice its possessor describes as “by nature soft and lyrical”?

“No,” Borodina answers through a bilingual Kirov staffer. “Marfa is deeply lyrical--religious, music of the soul. Valery made no mistake. But I had no experience. I thought it would be too difficult.”

(“I even took Olga for the international telecast,” Gergiev adds in a later conversation. “People thought I was totally mad.”)

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In the meantime, Borodina (the accent goes on the last syllable, though few non-Russians can be persuaded to put it there) has blossomed into the artist her mentor knew she could be. Her first two albums under an exclusive contract with Philips Classics are devoted to music of her native land. “Other singers record German and French music all the time,” she explains. “The Russian is not less beautiful!” A third album, due for release shortly, couples songs of Manuel de Falla with Spanish songs of Dmitri Shostakovich.

In opera, of course, a major career based on a virtually all-Russian repertory would be unthinkable even in Russia. With much advice and support from Gergiev, Borodina has been diversifying, offering valiant challenges to other idols of the age on their own turf. As Cinderella in Rossini’s “La Cenerentola,” she does not deliver the high-definition fireworks or verbal nuance with which Cecilia Bartoli has made critics swoon. As Verdi’s vengeful pharaoh princess Amneris in “Aida,” she does not hurl the sonic thunderbolts like Dolora Zajick; and her Carmen (due in San Francisco this fall) is unlikely to duplicate the uncanny personal identification achieved by Denyce Graves.

Yet Borodina compensates with an instinct for style, musical freshness and sheer bloom on the sound that seldom fail to carry the day. A critic captured the tenor of sheaves of reviews last year, when she characterized Borodina as “a mezzo of glorious richness, infinite expressiveness and profound beauty.” In London, Borodina’s Dalila was greeted with hosannas; soon, Saint-Saens’ mellifluous pagan temptress may become her personal property. She confesses a “crazy dream” of singing Verdi’s Desdemona some day--a genuine soprano part, but the notes should be no problem. In private, Borodina enjoys warbling the second aria of Mozart’s Queen of the Night, complete with high Fs.

For the health of their voices, some singers try to balance their dramatic roles against lyric or coloratura assignments. Borodina finds that strategy uncomfortable. “By nature, my voice is lyrical,” she says, “but I’ve come to an age when I want to do things that are passionate. They suit my character better.” Historically, such ambitions have cost many a voice its youthful bloom and velvet, but so far Borodina, who admits to being “between 30 and 40,” has been spared, partly because she refuses to be rushed.

“I’m a mother and a wife,” says Borodina, beaming her broad, mysterious smile. “I’m not too crazy about my career. A career can’t go up forever. At some point, it has to start coming down. I don’t want to force things. If you go up too soon, you will come down too fast.”

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Her husband, Leonid Sirotkin, plays oboe and English horn with the Kirov Orchestra; her son Alyosha (from a prior marriage) is growing up in St. Petersburg, mostly under the supervision of Borodina’s parents, non-musicians who used to work as engineers in a piano factory. Blame the post-Soviet economy. Foreign engagements, which pay hard currency, keep Borodina on the road some 10 months of the year.

“Unfortunately,” she says with a sigh, “I don’t have too much time for a normal life.”

Under her current contract, Borodina sings only six opera performances in St. Petersburg a year. But she tries to make herself available for tour dates whenever the peripatetic Gergiev sends out the call.

The city and its theater remain her center. Faced with the trials of life in the former Soviet bloc, many artists in a position to do so have pulled up stakes and headed West. Has Borodina ever been tempted to do likewise?

“No,” she says, beatific. “Never.”

* “Alexander Nevsky,” Olga Borodina with the Kirov Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Valery Gergiev, Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., 8:30 tonight. $1-$75. (213) 480-3232. For other Kirov Opera Orchestra and Chorus concerts, which continue through Sunday: (213) 850-2000.