Rachmaninov: Aleko

Written when Rachmaninov was only 19, Aleko is the first, most beautiful and least controversial of his operas. Based on Pushkin, it deals with an alienated Byronic outsider, who joins a band of gypsies out of an ideal of personal freedom, only to be psychologically destroyed by the ingrained moral conventions he has ironically sought to escape. The libretto, by the influential director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, over-compresses its source – but Rachmaninov's setting, Tchaikovskyan in its anguish yet rooted in the modalities of Caucasian folk music, has great force and insight. The opera has neither the structural awkwardness of Francesca da Rimini nor the antisemitism that makes The Miserly Knight indefensible. This new recording, the latest instalment of Gianandrea Noseda's Rachmaninov's cycle, was made last year during a BBC Philharmonic visit to Turin, where Noseda is also music director of the Teatro Regio. He conducts with his usual mix of passion and intellectual rigour, and there's some startlingly effective playing. It could, however, be better sung: the Teatro Regio Chorus sound distant and uninvolved; Sergey Murzaev's Aleko is good on psychopathology, but weak on empathy, and Svetla Vassileva is shrill as his amoral partner Zemfira.