Mozart and Salieri is no Amadeus, except insofar as its basic premise is the same well-known fiction of the poisoning—Pushkin's text ends with a Requiem-obsessed Mozart going to lie down, having quaffed the draught prepared by Salieri. Rimsky-Korsakov set it word for word in a blend of arioso and recitative. Thus the work, composed in 1897, falls midway in a tradition begun by Dargomizhsky's The Stone Guest, brought to an extreme point in 1868 by Mussorgsky's Marriage (hence the aptness of Olympia's coupling) and echoed in this century by Prokofiev's early operas and Shostakovich's incomplete The Gamblers.
The score weaves quotations from Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro and the Requiem into a texture which is otherwise frank pastiche. It is all attractively done, and there is an element of daring in the rather successful emulation of a Mozart keyboard Fantasy (which prompts Salieri to exclaim, ''You Mozart, are a god, and you yourself don't know it''). Probably not even the most ardent Rimsky-admirer would claim the work as one of his finest; but in its proto-neo-classical outlook and its radical attitude to word-setting it is certainly of no mean historical interest.
The two recordings under review are similar only in that the bass soloists eclipse the tenors, with Nesterenko's (on Olympia) by some distance the finest voice on display and Fedin's (also Olympia) the blandest. On Chandos Yuli Turovsky favours spacious tempos, plush textures and cosseted phrasing; on Olympia Ermler is more concerned with flow and natural flexibility. The latter takes 37'30'' as opposed to 43'30'' over the work, and I am bound to say that his is by far the more convincing approach, the more so since his Russian recording is not swamped by excessive resonance—the impression on the Chandos disc is of all the sound crowding into the foreground.
Compulsive Russophiles will want both discs, the Chandos if only for the chance to hear Vladimir Milman's orchestrations of selected Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov Romances. But modestly 1 though these versions have been prepared (with some rather charming added descants) and sympathetically though they are performed, I cannot say that the voice and piano originals are conspicuously enhanced.
The Mussorgsky is another matter altogether. Composed in 1868 The Marriage is his most outre composition, a document of calculatedly experimental 'realism' from which Boris Godunov, begun in the same year, marks a certain retreat (though a retreat to a more artistically satisfying position, it has to be said). The work was abandoned as a one-act fragment in piano score only, so we never get to find out whether the vain Podkolesin eventually wins his bride (he does so in the original Gogol tale, only to chicken out of marriage at the last moment). Gennadi Rozhdestvensky is the latest in a succession of orchestrators, and if his scoring occasionally sounds like a cross between Janacek and an accompaniment to cartoon comedy, it should be remembered that Mussorgsky's music is itself far ahead of its time. The recording dates from 1982 and is less vivid than it might be, nor is the singing uniformly first-class (though Vladimir Khrulev is excellent in the all-important part of Podkolesin). A minor distraction is the eccentric transliteration in an otherwise admirable booklet. But for the moment beggars can't be choosers—there is no other current version in the catalogue, and no aficionado of Russian opera can afford not to know this extraordinary work.'