“How mighty was the Handful?” might be a good essay title for the College’s General Paper. If answers had to be based on evidence available from this present recital, there can be little doubt that the ‘Might’ would be located in just one of the Five, for Mussorgsky stands out like a thumb, sore, maybe, but massive. Balakirev is the weakest member as represented here, his three songs so nearly commonplace, raised above that level by performances of unusual sensitivity, but always in danger of sinking back. Cui’s two are likeable, Borodin’s impressive, and the larger group by Rimsky-Korsakov have a strong emotional and melodic appeal though perhaps a certain sameness. With these poetic passions and melancholy romances Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death have about as much in common as Goya’s Old Man among Phantoms with Renoir’s Girl in a Hat.
It must also be a question whether the same singer can, by nature and art, encompass (so to speak) both Goya and Renoir. Sergei Larin remains true to himself, and sings the Songs and Dances with the utmost beauty of tone and purity of lyricism. In return, they seem to take it as a compliment, which in a way it is: they are so strong as to need no mouthing, declamation, histrionics, but, rather, to sharpen their acrid flavour against the sheer beauty of the singer’s voice. Not that Larin’s singing is in the least insipid. Death’s serenade goes at a ringing forte, the mother pleads woefully for her sick child, the Field Marshal enjoys an uproarious triumph. But these are the songs of Death, and they are well and truly sung.
As his Tchaikovsky song recital (also Chandos) showed, Larin comes among us bearing gifts long awaited. We have done well enough with Russian baritones, but tenors have been less forthcoming in this repertoire; and they are needed, for so many are love songs for which the tenor is best suited, and of course he may have a much wider expressive range than that. Larin’s tenor is beautifully pure, firm and even; it does not thin out in the lower register, and can rise with a powerful ring or a well-integrated head-voice. His artistry, relished as it was in the Tchaikovsky recital, shows further development in this, and he is better recorded. Eleonora Bekova plays in a style that admirably matches his, and if many of the songs have a delicacy one may think of as feminine, the last of Mussorgsky’s four presents a harder and harsher challenge, which she meets with ample resource.'