Yuri Bashmet and the Moscow Soloists at Cadogan Hall

Here's my review of last Wednesday's concert at the Cadogan Hall, part of the Moscow Soloists' 20th-anniversary tour. It takes in dates in an astonishing 80 cities, and apparently mixes and matches the soloists. I was interested here to get a chance to hear the soprano Dinara Alieva. Her biography--which both describes her as 'combin[ing] a distinctive voice together with an extraordinary physical beauty' and refers to her as a 'modest person'--is hardly immediately endearing, but it's an interesting voice, and she has undoubted glamour (and, on the evidence of this concert, an impressive collection of sparkly high heels). Apparently she's becoming something of a fixture in Vienna, and I'd very much like to hear her in a role on stage.

Here she is in Tatyana's Letter Scene (forced, like Amanda Echalaz at ENO into a bit of lying on the back half way through--do people really do this in real life? But at least there is a bed. And quite a big one at that). It seems as though she has a bit of a tendency to over-act from this, but that might well be the production's fault; that bed is hardly conducive to intimacy.