To judge from current reference books (I haven’t found a single reference to her) Zara Dolukhanova is all but forgotten in the West. She certainly doesn’t deserve to be. Her voice was a faultlessly produced mezzo of great beauty, extending upwards well into the soprano range, downward far enough to make a formidably sultry Dalila, yet without any of that ugly barking which some mezzos use instead of low notes. Her range of character was even wider, from a really charming and stylish Cherubino (“Non so piu cosa son” in Russian) to a full-voiced, devout and thoroughly Verdian account (in Italian) of the first of the Four Sacred Pieces. Her coloratura was accomplished, so her Rossini comes off well in both languages (in a Russian “Una voce poco fa” she is a smiling, not a vixenish Rosina).
The Russian items give an excellent idea of her vocal range: generous and eloquent amplitude of voice in Joan’s farewell from Tchaikovsky’s The Maid of Orleans (a soprano role modified for a mezzo, but still needing soprano brightness), dark gravity and urgency in Marfa’s soothsaying from Khovanshchina and, in a particularly Wagner-influenced Rimsky-Korsakov monologue (Kashchey) the sort of dramatic declamation that makes you wonder whether she ever dipped a toe into the Wagnerian repertory.
The recordings were made at a public concert during, by the sound of the coughing, a damp Moscow January. The orchestral playing is at times a little unkempt, and the voice is placed well forward.
Yet with such a voice, who’s complaining? Only the extracts from Russian operas are provided with texts, and the insert-notes are effusive rubbish (“wearing a simple white dress which fitted her perfect body”), but when they speak of her “most beautiful voice, which is simultaneously so powerful and exquisitely graceful, dense and succulent as a peach”, they do not exaggerate.'