The Erato issue of the 1984 Paris live performance of Iolanta under Rostropovich was in a number of ways unsatisfactory. Vishnevskaya had left it a little late in her career to record this touching little princess, blind and virginal, into whose darkness and isolation there eventually shines the ‘bright angel’ of Duke Robert. There were also problems attached to the recording, detailed by Geoffrey Horn in his review of the transfer to CD in 1986; he mentioned awkward edits, rushed entries at track points and some microphone oddities, among other questionable matters.
Strongly in the set’s favour was Nicolai Gedda as Vaudemont, as elegant as ever, singing with ardour and charm. Gegam Grigorian cannot match him on this new recording, and sounds pinched and sometimes under strain even in the Romance. He is also overshadowed by Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who delivers himself of a splendid apostrophe to his beloved Mathilde. This is Hvorostovsky at his best: warm and with a somewhat dusky tone, responding with great sensitivity to the often elusive melodic lines which Tchaikovsky writes in this, his last opera. The King, Provence’s ‘bon roi Rene’, is benignly if a little throatily sung by Sergei Alexashkin, and he has at hand a sturdy-voiced Ibn-Hakia in Nikolai Putilin.
Iolanta herself is delightfully sung by Galina Gorchakova. There is a freshness and sense of vulnerability here which was lacking in Vishnevskaya’s performance, especially in the opening scenes with Martha in the garden as she sings wistfully of something that appears to be lacking in her life: the Arioso is done charmingly and without sentimentality. Valery Gergiev conducts a sensitive performance, responding constructively to the unusual scoring (much disliked by the possibly jealous Rimsky-Korsakov), and not overplaying the more demonstrative elements in a score that gains most through some understatement. The booklet very sensibly prints in parallel columns a transliteration of the Russian, then English, German and French; the text in the original Cyrillic is printed separately at the end.'