Solomon Khromchenko

Jewish and Russian songs

00:00

Instrumental ensemble, conductor Anatoly Tsadikovsky

00:00

Annotation

After leaving the Bolshoi company in 1957, Solomon Khromchenko remained a highly popular performer on concert stage and radio, being particularly noted for his performance of Russian romances. His exceptional technique, sustained by a strict regime of vocal hygiene and daily exercises, enabled him to extend his singing career far being the limits normally prescribed for the human voice. The nine Russian romances presented in this disc, mingling the notes of love, nostalgia and hope, illustrate the point eloquently: these recordings were all made between Solomon Khromchenko’s 70th and 75th birthday.

Circumstances in the Soviet Union were long unfavourable to the expression of one other important aspect of Solomon Khromchnko’s musical heritage. It was not until the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika – over sixty years after he had first intoned the sacred chants of the synagogue – that he was able to commit to record songs for the rich collection of Jewish folk music. The nine songs included here and performed in Yiddish, many of which he personally rescued from obscurity of the Lenin State Library in Moscow, echo the perennial themes of the Russian romances while transposing them into a more extravert Jewish mode. All the recordings were made by Solomon Khromchenko in 1987, on the eve of his eightieth birthday! In 1988 they were released as a separate LP, which sold out instantly. Please note the violin solos of Leonarda Brushtein (1935-1999) in Nos. 13 and 14: the playing of this pupil of the legendary Abram Yampolsky and David Oistrakh is admirable!

This ‘consolidated’ CD, is thus a testimony to a remarkable vocal career spanning half a century and to the two complementary artistic traditions that nurtured it. It also draws on a long-standing partnership with Anatoly Tsadikovsky, who was responsible for most of the musical arrangements and for the direction of the instrumental ensemble which accompanied Solomon Khromchenko in these recordings.