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Anna Netrebko: In the Still of Night Deutsche and Plácido Domingo: La Nuit de mai Deutsche

A double release of odd couples from Deutsche Grammophon includes a superstar pairing that works, and one that doesn’t

Geoff Brown

Anna Netrebko: In the Still of Night Deutsche
4 Stars

Plácido Domingo: La Nuit de mai Deutsche
2 Stars

Felix and Oscar, the mismatched roommates in Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple, have finally been outclassed by the wizards of Deutsche Grammophon. For the label has just issued two CDs from classical music artists yoked together in pairings unimaginable to any sober mind.

One of them features the glamorous Russian diva Anna Netrebko singing Russian songs (fair enough). Her piano accompanist is some up-and-coming chap called Daniel Barenboim. The other release brackets that tireless tenor Plácido Domingo with a younger whippersnapper from China, Lang Lang.

Is this madness? Not in the case of the Netrebko disc, In the Still of Night — named after the first of the 11 Rimsky-Korsakov songs included in this Salzburg Festival recital, recorded live last August. (Nine Tchaikovsky songs follow.) Russian songs and romances may not be Barenboim’s usual repertoire, but he presents the accompaniments subtly, and with selfless generosity.

More surprisingly, these superstars work very well as a team: the Salzburg show was a true joint recital, with emotions, mostly of a melancholy disposition, weaving back and forth.

Netrebko’s voice, fuller in tone than it has been before, dapples these miseries of love with nicely varied colours and intoxicating shots of high drama. Heady stuff, this Russian gloom; so is her final encore, Strauss’s Cäcilie, given a very torrid reading. Be warned that the song texts are only found online, unless you purchase the “Prestige Edition”.

But when Lang Lang partners Domingo in five trifling songs by Leoncavallo, it sounds almost as if each had been recorded in a different studio: there’s no audible bond, no shared spark.

Domingo’s Leoncavallo release offers nothing like the same interest and quality. There are reasons why the world doesn’t know Leoncavallo’s La Nuit de mai, a symphonic poem with tenor inserts that rumbles on for 40 minutes. At best it’s only mildly pleasing. Strain at the top of Domingo’s voice is audible, but his spirit is willing.

The rumble finished, conductor Alberto Veronesi and the Teatro Communale Orchestra of Bologna disappear and Lang Lang’s piano enters — sometimes forceful, sometimes limpid in the songs’ rudimentary accompaniments.

Two solo pieces give him more scope. Not a disc to welcome, really, except by “odd couple” obsessives.

(Grammophon)