Russian and Opera Recital – Boris Christoff

There is a particular sound a great bass makes at the bottom of the staff that no amount of digital remastering can flatten out — a kind of dark velvet with grit underneath it, like a cello string bowed too close to the bridge. Boris Christoff had that sound in more or less unlimited supply, and this sprawling compilation, gathering opera and song across more than a decade of his prime, is a reminder of how rare it has become.

Start with the obvious: the Mussorgsky. Christoff’s account of the Death of Boris — the mono version, with its close, almost claustrophobic studio balance — remains a benchmark against which every subsequent Boris has had to be measured, usually unfavorably. The prayer that precedes it (CD 9, tracks 4–5) is sung not as a display piece but as a man talking himself down from madness, phrase by phrase, the tone thinning and cracking exactly where the text wants it to. Then the death itself: the great cry, the collapse, the bells. It is almost unbearable. I have heard this piece done “better” in some narrow technical sense — cleaner intonation, tidier legato — and it meant nothing next to this.

He re-recorded the scene in stereo years later (CD 11, track 13), and it’s fascinating, and a little sad, to hear what changed. The voice had thickened, lost some of its flexibility at the top of the range. The authority, if anything, had deepened. Christoff by then had lived inside this role for the better part of two decades. You can hear it in every bar.

The Verdi is a different animal entirely, and here I confess some of the songs and arias interest me less than the Boris material — not because Christoff sings them poorly, far from it, but because his temperament was so profoundly, almost exclusively Slavic that his Italian repertoire, however commanding, sometimes feels like a guest appearance. Not so “Ella giammai m’amò” (CD 10, track 10). This soliloquy of Philip II’s — the aging king alone at 4 a.m., unloved, unloving, staring at the ceiling of his own tomb before he’s even dead — suits Christoff’s peculiar gift for sung introspection perfectly. The cello obbligato winds around that huge dark voice and for four minutes Verdi and Mussorgsky seem to be speaking the same language after all: the language of solitary power curdling into grief.

The Russian songs are where the collection’s real education lies, frankly, for listeners who know Christoff only from the opera house. Glinka, Mussorgsky’s shorter songs, Borodin, Cui, Balakirev — this is repertoire that gets a fraction of the exposure the operas do, and Christoff treats it with the same interpretive seriousness. His diction, in Russian above all, is a marvel: consonants placed with an almost sculptural precision, vowels darkened or brightened according to the emotional temperature of the line.

I’ll admit a bias. I grew up with these voices — Christoff’s, and Chaliapin’s before him — filling a living room on scratchy shellac, and something in me still measures every subsequent bass against that standard, probably unfairly. But bias aside, the historical case for Christoff is not sentimental. Sir David Webster’s stubborn refusal to give him more than two roles at Covent Garden — Boris and Philip, decade after decade — was a real loss to London audiences, whatever the political or contractual reasons behind it; the Fiesco I caught in 1973 only confirmed what range he had that went mostly unheard on that stage. This set, whatever its inevitable unevenness across a decade-plus of sessions, argues eloquently for the fullness of an artist too often reduced to a single, if towering, characterization.

Is it a version I’d recommend uncritically to a newcomer to Boris Godunov? No — for that, the complete 1952 Naxos transfer, or one of the fuller-cast studio recordings, serves better. But as a portrait of a singular voice and temperament, ranging from Glinka’s drawing-room lyricism to Mussorgsky’s most harrowing pages, this compilation is indispensable. They don’t make them like this anymore. I say that not out of nostalgia but as plain fact.