Glorious singing here by one of the great basses of the century. There can never have been a steadier voice, or one more evenly produced throughout its extensive range. In many of these solos the tessitura is high, uncomfortably so, I would have thought, for a deep bass; yet Reizen sings with marvellous ease and security, while at the bottom end of the scale, as in Khan Kontchak's song from Prince Igor, he can descend note by note to the low F with the full-bodied richness and warmth of a fine cello in its low register. His phrases have a similarly instrumental breadth (hear the beautifully sustained lines of Prince Gremin's aria in Eugene Onegin, for instance). His power of crescendo, too, is that of a master, and in the aria from A Life for the Tsar it matches perfectly the intensifying of emotion. In the prestissimo patter of Ruslan and Ludmilla he gives every syllable its full singing-tone and its full musical value. In the passionate outburst of Rachmaninov's Aleko he remains scrupulously lyrical, resisting any impulse to achieve dramatic effect by declamation. Perhaps in Boris's monologue this puts too severe a discipline upon him: at least, the pain and near-despair seem not to permeate the voice, expressive as his singing is in its well-judged contrasts and its establishment of a fully human character.
The transfers are fine, and the presentation is consistent with the rest of the Lebendige Vergangenheit series on Preiser: fairly short biographical notes are provided in English and German, but listeners are thrown upon their own resources to find out about the music itself. In this instance, I think an exception should have been made, for it is essential to know something of the dramatic context, and, really, to be able to refer to both text and translation, these being not easy to find. ''They guess the truth'' sings Susanin (A Life for the Tsar) at the start of his aria; but no, that's too much to hope for. One other truth which the listener might well fail to guess, is that the aria and the others recorded in 1955 are sung by a man of 60. But at that time Reizen was still (almost) a youngster: he recorded a complete recital in Russia to celebrate his eighty-fifth birthday in 1980, appeared as Gremin at the Bolshoi ten years later, and as far as we know is looking forward to his centenary in three years time.'