Deborah is exemplary

Ms. Voigt sang in Moscow at the opening of the Russian Winter festival

This December has brought great singers from the world stage to the Moscow concert scene. In the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, Jose Carreras, who is already traditional for winter Moscow, sang. On December 27, in the Great Hall of the Conservatory, Maria Guleghina, who has already appeared with Carreras, will sing - in the program “Passion for Verismo” she most likely will not leave listeners without her famous Tosca. And on the festive evening of December 31, the walls of the House of Music will be illuminated by the playful light of the dashing tenor of the Argentine Marcelo Alvarez - splashes of champagne are very suitable for his jovial roles (the most successful and famous of them are Alfred in La Traviata and the Duke in Rigoletto), a sparkling mixture of temperament and lyricism, proud stature and status as one of the first handsome and smart men of the new generation.

In this list, the American Deborah Voigt, who sang at the Big Concert Hall at the opening of the traditional philharmonic festival “Russian Winter” not in a solo program, but with the “New Russia” orchestra and conductor Evgeny Bushkov, stands apart. She does not belong either to the ranks of elderly generals or to the ranks of new charming heroes. Deborah Voight is the great prima donna of the Metropolitan Opera in the prime of her career, with an impressive and almost unique background and with a sense of enormous potential - unsung, but suggesting, saved parts.

The last (and first) time Deborah Voight came to Moscow was in 1990 - she was a little-known young singer and received first prize at the Competition to the thunder of applause. Tchaikovsky. She claims that this victory gave her a lot, and looks at the audience of the Great Hall as if it were her own.

Over these fifteen years, Voight has earned fame as the best performer of magic roles in the operas of Richard Strauss - her Ariadne, Salome, and Helen of Egypt are unique and exemplary. She made people talk about herself as one of the best Wagnerian singers, although she sang only Sieglinde in “Die Walküre” and “Isolde” in “Tristan and Isolde” (and only in one single production in Vienna). She survived dismissal from the Covent Garden theater due to being overweight, lost weight, became an absolute beauty and bewitched the whole world, depriving her offenders of even the hope of meeting herself and her voice. In his career, Voight behaves confidently and at the same time delicately. The same is true in her voice and interpretations. They emit a bright, not blinding, but strong and even light. And the style that Voight masters perfectly helps her heroines to do without the slightest hint of vulgarity or strain. This especially adorns her Wagnerian and Straussian roles - so much nobility, strength, light and tenderness that does not spread to the point of tearfulness, so many shades, carefully verified and expressed with amazing organicity, it is difficult to find in anyone else even in the very first ranks of the performers.

Not paying attention to the rustic course of the diligent accompaniment, which either drowned out the singer’s powerful voice or settled on it like snow on the roofs, Voight superbly sang her signature concert number - the Elizabeth scene from the second act of Tannhäuser. Then she played with her face everything that the orchestra failed to play in the introduction to the opera “Tristan and Isolde”, and sang “The Death of Isolde” with a paradoxical and, as it turned out, quite appropriate, all-permeating liveliness. In the final scene from Salome, Deborah Voight made the audience tremble and gasp at the strength and beauty of her wayward heroine and her vocal perfection. Voight's voice has amazing flight characteristics; it flies around the hall, shimmering and rounding in space. She herself has an incredible amount of life, but this vitality is cut so meticulously and strictly that it never crosses the boundaries of beauty and elegance.

As a farewell, Voight sang two songs from her new cabaret program (Gershwin, Berlin and others), the American premiere of which is scheduled for January. The hall was not full (few people here are familiar with the art of Deborah Voigt, and tickets for one and a half to three thousand turned out to be too expensive), but completely enchanted.

Perhaps the entire program as a whole, together with the orchestral episodes, could have been brighter if the fashionable conductor Teodor Currentzis had not been forced to refuse to participate in it due to the need to host top government officials in Novosibirsk shortly before the concert. But almost nothing distracted the audience from the beautiful prima.

Yulia BEDEROVA