Festival Music

Venera Gimadieva

Queen's Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

THERE was an astonishing pianist at the Queen's Hall on Friday, so it looked a little disappointing that his scheduled second-half Rachmaninov prelude was to be omitted from the programme performed. Pavel Nebolsin's virtuosic performance of Tchaikovsky's Dumka of 1884, a sort of Russian folk tale without words, was, however, eventually followed by a solo encore of his own superbly flashy arrangement of Piazzolla's Libertango, so the deficit was made up.

I think I might have enjoyed hearing Venera Gimadieva sing the vocal version of that piece too, because this was actually the coloratura soprano's show, even if the rapport with her colleague from the Bolshoi was crucial to its success. Her choice of songs was an education in the Russian art-song of he 19th and 20th Centuries, with four by Tchaikovsky the oldest of them, but often sounding the most modern in melody, accompaniment and subject matter. After demonstrating flawless control of her superb instrument of Lullaby, the last of them, Pimpinella, clearly commenting on the composer's own suppressed sexual inclinations.

On the brace of songs by Sergey Vasilenko that followed, the soprano became two very different women: the first, setting Pushkin Prize-winning poet Mirra Lokhvitskaya, very much in control, the folk song maiden of the second rather more coy and fatalistic.

There was a vein of wordless singing running through her programme from the conclusion of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Nymph, via Reinhold Gliere's setting of Konstantin Balmont's version of Rusalka, to Vocalise, which concluded her set of Rachmaninov songs. That piece perhaps excepted, Gimadieva's welcome international glamour and full-on performance also brought some very interesting choices to eager Edinburgh ears.