<<  -- 5 --  Roderic Dunnett    BEAUTIFULLY TOGETHER

This was not merely functional playing from the Odessan orchestra : often enough they served up instrumental playing of a phenomenally high order, with first class top strings and much strong support from the rest. Moreover, it was Skibinskiy's ability to nurse the singers, while accompanying with acute attentiveness and sensitivity at the same time, which generated the performance's best features -- a most advantageous symbiosis between the Odessa orchestra and its singers (Alfredo's first aria, for instance), and a seeming ease of delivery masking meticulous preparation.

Elena Gherman may not be everything a Violetta could be : despite her wonderful rising to the occasion, and her accuracy across Violetta's demanding coloratura -- which lies across not just the mid registers (in which she excels) but upper tessitura too -- her voice just occasionally slips off the note, as (more obviously) did Lykach's, usually on descending phrases, to the quite serious disadvantage of his opening aria. By contrast, their effectively sung virtually coloratura duet came across gloriously together.

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