Russian Opera Arias – Dinara Alieva

Some singers announce themselves with restraint. Dinara Alieva does not bother with such modesty, and on the evidence of this program, she has earned the right.

The voice itself is the story here: a lustrous, evenly produced lyric-dramatic soprano with a gleam at the top that never hardens into steel, and a chest register she deploys sparingly, like a good cook with salt. Her account of Rachmaninov’s Vocalise opens the disc almost as a dare. No words to hide behind, nothing but line, breath, and color. She floats the opening phrase with a thread of tone that would have pleased Nezhdanova, then opens out gradually, never forcing, each return of the melody shaded a little differently. The trill near the close is real, not a wobble dressed up as ornament, an actual, evenly oscillating trill, something you don’t hear often enough these days even from singers twice her age.

Tchaikovsky suits her temperament. Liza’s “Otkuda eti slyozï” from The Queen of Spades gets sung with a kind of wounded dignity rather than generalized anguish, the text — even to ears as rusty in Russian as mine — landing with real weight on key words. By the time we reach the Act III scene, “Uzh polnoch’ blizitsya,” Alieva has found the opera’s tragic register fully. This is arguably the disc’s peak: desperation held in check by sheer vocal control, which is exactly backwards from how lesser singers approach the scene, and exactly right.

The two Rimsky-Korsakov excerpts from The Tsar’s Bride remind us how unjustly neglected this composer remains outside Russia. His melodic gift here is Tchaikovsky-adjacent but cooler, more enameled, the orchestration glowing like something out of a Vrubel canvas. Marfa’s narrative “V Novgorode” wants an almost girlish simplicity at the start, curdling into something more troubled as the scene unwinds; the Act IV aria “Ivan Sergeich,” depicting a mind already slipping into madness, is heartbreaking without a trace of melodrama. I’ve heard this music sung well. I’m not sure I’ve heard it sung better.

Rachmaninov’s early song “Ne poy, krasavitsa” (after Pushkin, by way of that persistent Georgian-melody obsession that runs through nineteenth-century Russian music — Glinka got there first) comes off beautifully in Ruben Stepanyan’s orchestral dress, lush without turning soupy. And the Francesca da Rimini excerpt, an opera almost nobody stages, more’s the pity, shows Alieva unbothered by a wicked tessitura, the voice blooming rather than straining at the top of the staff.

Where the disc ultimately stakes its claim, though, is Tatiana’s Letter Scene. Twelve-plus minutes is a long time to sustain a single emotional arc, moving from girlish infatuation through doubt to a kind of reckless, self-endangering resolve. Alieva doesn’t shortcut any of it. I think of Galina Vishnevskaya’s classic traversal, of Renée Fleming’s more cultivated but cooler version, of Soile Isokoski’s creamy restraint in Helsinki some seasons back; Alieva belongs in that company, youthful urgency intact, the voice unspooling Tchaikovsky’s long paragraphs like she’s discovering the words as she sings them. That’s the trick of this scene, sounding spontaneous while every phrase is calculated to the eighth-note, and she has it.

Dmitry Yablonsky and the New Russia State Symphony Orchestra deserve real credit too. The playing has idiomatic warmth, woodwind solos that breathe rather than merely execute, and the engineering captures voice and orchestra in a believable, unforced balance. No spotlighting, no artificial halo around the singer.

A genuine find, this. Competition in this repertoire is not thin, but Alieva holds her own against singers with decades more experience, and she does it without a single moment of vocal grandstanding. File this one where you’ll find it again.