Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov – Talvela, Semkow

There is a particular chill that comes over a listener the first time he hears the “Coronation Scene” without Rimsky-Korsakov’s varnish — those parallel bells, that grinding, unresolved orchestral mass instead of the plush glow we all grew up on. EMI’s Polish-made Boris Godunov, taped in the mid-1970s under Jerzy Semkow, was one of the first widely circulated recordings to make that case to Western ears. Whatever its shortcomings — and there are some — it deserves to be remembered as an act of advocacy as much as an interpretation.

Martti Talvela’s Tsar sits at the center of it, and rightly so. This is a bass whose sheer scale could flatten a hall — I recall him at the Met in the 1970s, a genuine giant of a man producing sound to match — yet here he resists every temptation toward the emoting of the old Chaliapin school. No clutching, no vocal collapse into sobs for effect. His hallucination scene is sung, not screamed, the terror internalized rather than played to the back row. It’s a Boris closer in temperament to Nesterenko than to Christoff. History has vindicated that restraint; too many Borises turn the role into a wax museum exhibit of Russian suffering.

Around him, the Polish contingent is the real discovery. Leonard Mróz’s Pimen has an unhurried, granite dignity — the voice a little grey at the edges, which only helps. This is a monk who has seen too much history to raise his voice about any of it. Andrzej Hiolski, doing double duty as Shchelkalov and Rangoni, sings with a burnished, faintly husky baritone that kept reminding me — oddly, pleasurably — of Mario Sereni on his best nights at the old Met broadcasts. There’s an Italianate sheen to the line that has no business working in Mussorgsky and works anyway.

Bożena Kinasz, a name that has vanished almost entirely from the discographies, sings Marina with a heat and a metal in the top voice that make you wonder why nobody exported her. She is, if anything, too formidable a partner for Gedda’s Dmitri in their Act III duet. Gedda is elegant as ever, a stylist to his fingertips, but the voice was never a huge or fully open instrument, and here it sounds throttled, pressed, chasing her sound rather than matching it. It’s the one piece of casting in this set that never quite balances.

Aage Haugland’s Varlaam is a rowdy, catch-as-catch-can piece of buffoonery — great fun in “the Kazan” song, wobbly and coarse everywhere else, the sort of singing that gets by on personality rather than mastery. Not a fatal flaw. Varlaam has survived worse.

My real reservation is with Semkow himself. He is an intelligent, scrupulous Mussorgskian, alert to color. Those strings in the Polish Radio orchestra have an almost autumnal warmth you don’t often hear from Russian or Soviet-era bands, all covered tone and legato weight. But he under-plays the drama at exactly the moments the drama demands he not. The Slava chorus that closes the prologue wants blood and stamping feet; here it merely proceeds. Boris’s death goes by with a curious lack of shudder, the pulse sagging just when Mussorgsky’s own orchestration — those bare fifths, that tolling ostinato — ought to do the shuddering for you. Compare Gergiev’s Kirov version, which for all its studio imperfections snarls where Semkow demurs, or even older, cruder Melodiya efforts that somehow find more menace in far worse sound.

So: a Boris of real distinction, not the Boris. Talvela alone justifies owning it, and the small-role singing throughout is remarkably characterful for a cast largely unknown outside Poland. But it comes to us without a libretto — a serious deficiency for any Western listener trying to track this labyrinthine, multiply-revised text — and it does not displace Gergiev’s later, more viscerally sung Kirov account of the same 1872 score. Recommended, then, with real affection and one eyebrow raised.