Leiferkus has recorded nothing finer than this rightly daunting interpretation of the Suite on Verses of Michelangelo. Shostakovich’s greatest, most monolithic song-cycle – equal first if you include the Fourteenth Symphony – can take more than one point of view, and I wouldn’t like to choose between this, Nestorenko’s shamefully unavailable account with piano – on HMV Melodiya, 5/77 – and Fischer-Dieskau’s wise reading with Ashkenazy. To compensate for the current absence of a true bass contender, we are lucky indeed to have had two recordings within a few years from two baritones with the right bass colouring where necessary, and the right dedication.
Ultimately, choice depends on where your preferences lie. Fischer-Dieskau characteristically catches the confidential nuances of the recitative-like “Morning” and the introspective magic of “Love” and “Night”. His is perhaps the more searching version, but one should never underestimate Leiferkus’s sheer vocal beauty of line and sheen in the superb declamatory settings of “Dante” and its companion-piece hymn to the exiled poet (parallels with Solzhenitsyn were inescapable in 1974); nor is there that lack of a deeper understanding elsewhere in the cycle sometimes sensed in previous recordings by Leiferkus. It is simply that his tone is defiant where Fischer-Dieskau’s inclines to heart-breaking introspection – the respective interpretations of the last line of the final song, “Immortality”, says it all. Matters are further complicated by the greater introspection of Leiferkus’s orchestra and conductor: the shadowy chords underpinning the earlier songs and punctuating the wonderful exchange of verses between Strozzi and Michelangelo on the sculptor’s sleep in “Night” are carefully projected with all the infinite atmosphere one has come to expect from Jarvi’s rapport with his supremely resonant Gothenburg strings.
The similar mood of the near-contemporary Tsvetayeva settings, no less profound in their reflection on creativity and the State, make a perfect coupling for the Michelangelo Suite. Zaremba, a true contralto, is another great Russian voice a little overshadowed recently – very impressive indeed, like Leiferkus, in majestic declamation, but more distractingly loud (and her up-front role in the recording doesn’t help) when she should be withdrawn. That is also true of the tenor Ilya Levinsky in the Romances on Japanese Poems. A dark sidelight on Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the plangent aspect of the sequence is best served when Levinsky plays respectively the rejected and the unrequited lovers of the fourth and the fifth songs.
Investigate the first two cycles to check the vocal progress of two fine young Russian singers; but don’t miss Leiferkus’s Michelangelo Suite, even if Fischer-Dieskau already has an affectionate place on your shelves.'