AP News, May 31st, 2007
Give Anna Netrebko credit for knowing that it's one thing to wow an audience in a fully staged opera, and quite another to hold a crowd at rapt attention in the concert hall.
The young Russian has become a superstar with seeming ease at the Metropolitan Opera and other houses around the world on the strength of her dark-haired beauty, her fearless dramatic instincts and her flexible lyric soprano voice.
But a year ago, she canceled a planned recital debut at Carnegie Hall, saying she did not feel "artistically ready" for the challenge.
On Wednesday night she accepted the challenge _ sort of. Instead of appearing alone with piano accompanist, she chose to share the stage with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and her countryman, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, one of the world's leading baritones.
If the program of mostly familiar arias and duets gave her plenty of opportunity to sparkle, it also exposed some vocal blemishes that were magnified by Carnegie's unforgiving acoustics. There were no blemishes in her appearance, however. Her glamorous figure was well displayed in two different outfits _ a low-cut black evening gown for the first half, and a strapless beige dress with sequins for the second.
In her opening number, Juliette's waltz song from Gounod's "Romeo et Juliette," she sounded more nervous than impetuous. The Act 1 aria from Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" was theatrically gripping, as was the haunting "Song to the Moon" from Dvorak's "Rusalka." A sad Rachmaninoff song, "Oh, Do Not Sing to Me, Fair Maiden" was lovely, until marred by a slight crack on one high note. Her two duets with Hvorostovsky, from Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" and Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin," were well sung but seemed dubious choices for the concert hall, dependent as they are on the dramatic context of the full operas.
Netrebko's best performance of the night may have come in an encore, a charmingly over-the-top rendition of "Meine Lippen, sie kuessen so heiss," from Franz Lehar's operetta "Giuditta."
Hvorostovsky, who settled for a single outfit _ a black open-collar shirt and what looked like black leather pants _ picked two selections for the first half that were oddly ill-suited to his vocal abilities. He lacks the low notes to pull off the Toreador Song from Bizet's "Carmen" or the power to turn Iago's "Credo" from Verdi's "Otello" into a sinister showstopper (he did produce a dandy maniacal laugh at the end, though). He seemed far more at home in the second half, with Igor's aria from Borodin's "Prince Igor," and the aria that highlighted his Met debut more than a decade ago, Yeletsky's aria from Tchaikovsky's "Queen of Spades."
Ascher Fisch conducted the orchestra in a bombastic performance of Rossini's Overture to "La gazza ladra" to open the evening and later led it through a graceful Waltz from "Eugene Onegin."
