Russia’s National Unity Day is marked by week-long celebrations ending on November 11. A day before they were due to end, a recital by baritone Aleksei Safiulin was presented in the Tchaikovsky Hall at the Russian Centre for Science and Culture, Valletta.
Aleksei Safiulin’s voice is strong and rich, well-controlled and can be as mellow and suave as powerful and very passionate- Albert Storace
Safiulin performed with his accompanist, pianist Kseniya Bashmet, who incidentally is daughter of the renowned viola virtuoso Yuri Bashmet.
Safiulin proved to be an all-rounder as a singer and also quite a showman. He feels at home singing opera, classical songs, folk songs and jazz, not to mention popular songs from Russia and elsewhere.
His voice is strong, rich, well-controlled and can be as mellow and suave as it can be powerful and passionate. He moved with great ease from idiom to idiom and genre to genre, and communicated very well with the audience.
The concert began with one of Yevgeny Onyegin’s arias from the eponymous Tchaikovsky opera, colouring it with pathos and anguish, ending it all with a superbly controlled soft finish.
The aria from Borodin’s Prince Igor had a magnificent sweep to it and contrasted very well with the swagger and panache of Escamillo’s aria from Bizet’s Carmen, a piece which only the ideal combination of voice and physique could carry off – Safiulin has both.
He then sailed very smoothly through the Italian tongue-twister from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, namely Fin Ch’han Il Vino.
Equally classy was the rendering of Rakhmaninov’s Oh, My Cornfield, replete with a passionate attachment to the earth and sung with the same great expression which marked the follow-ing song’s interpretation, that of Sviridov’s Motherland.
Bashmet provided a delightful interlude with a solo, an arrangement of Schubert’s Du Bist Die Ruh/You Are The Silence.
From then on, with Safiulin’s return and change of attire came singing of a different kind, to recorded musical backing.
He began with Giuseppe Cioffi’s Na Sera E’ Maggio in which Russian and Italian ardour were blended pretty well.
In Gershwin’s Summertime, rarely sung by a male singer in concert, there was a lively jazzed-up interpretation which went down very well, as did Pablo Beltran Ruiz’s Sway and Andrea Celenatano’s poignant Confessa.
Giving in to the audience’s warm response to his singing, there were two encores, Joe Cocker’s You Are So Beautiful and a song from Aleksei Rybnikov’s very popular Russian rock-opera Yunona And Avos.