Eclectic set from Siberian baritone

Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky is best known in the West for his ability to win you over in both Russian and Verdian opera. Indeed, we were supposed to have seen him in the role of Giorgio Germont last fall in Los Angeles Opera’s starry production of “La Traviata,” but that fell through.

Yet Hvorostovsky’s fans didn’t have to wait all that long for another appearance, as he came through town Sunday night with his “Russian Soul” show.

The local Russian community turned out en masse for the concert, not quite enough to fill the Pasadena Civic Auditorium (the tour’s stop at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall on Wednesday is sold out) but enough to make Russian the dominant language in the lobby and outside.

Drawing upon his formative years listening to all kinds of Russian vocal music, Hvorostovsky came up with an enlightening, logical, roughly chronological tour that didn’t favor one idiom or another. His frequent collaborator, conductor Constantine Orbelian -- the San Franciscan who has made himself perfectly at home in Russia -- was there with his excellent Moscow Chamber Orchestra and a handsome young chamber chorus (the Academy of Choral Art Choir of Moscow) whose Slavic-edged high register cut like glass.

To an outsider, the common roots of these selections were more striking than their diversity. In the ecclesiastical a cappella vocal/choral pieces at the start, one was always aware of a distinctly Russian, mostly minor-key flavor. Hvorostovsky is a master of big, seamless, rolling legatos, and there was a controlled dignity and restraint in his singing that carried over from the sacred music into the selection of arias from Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Tsar’s Bride” and Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” and “The Queen of Spades.”

With the addition of two domras (mandolin-like instruments) and a bayan (a button accordion), Hvorostovsky and company next ventured into traditional Russian romances, flavored with folk elements that became explicit in a choral medley of Russian folk songs.

Then someone ominously placed a microphone onstage -- uh-oh -- but Hvorostovsky knew how to handle it, underplaying, not trying to belt into the device. We were now in more or less contemporary Russian popular music territory, with sometimes intriguing material (one number, “Tenderness,” was a song of yearning involving the first manned space flight) backed with primary-colored arrangements by Evgeny Stetsyuk.

To me, this was little more than a Slavic translation of popera -- that wildly popular fusion of the most sentimental aspects of opera and the most overblown pretensions of pop.

The world is getting smaller, alas. But Hvorostovsky sounded as comfortable within this idiom as he was in “Onegin.”

Inevitably, the encores were Solovyov-Sedoy’s ever-haunting “Moscow Nights” and “Dark Eyes.”