KEY POINTS:
Anna Netrebko is lapping up the sybaritic pleasures of the West. The Russian diva shops at Saks Fifth Avenue, made her Hollywood debut with a walk-on role in Princess Diaries 2 and her groove of choice is the hip-hopping Black Eyed Peas.
For those of us who know the legend only through her recordings, she has dwelt of late mainly on the Italian repertoire, including last year's La Traviata. This Salzburg Festival production, available on CD and DVD, revealed a Violetta who, for all her vocal heft, paled beside the harrowing Teresa Stratas in Zeffirelli's 1982 film of the opera.
Netrebko's new disc has her back home singing Russian music, some of which, curiously, cemented her reputation in America a decade ago.
Legendary Bolshoi and Mariinsky classics such as Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden and Tchaikovsky's Iolanta are here, along with standards such as Eugene Onegin.
With them comes a gallery of heroines: a Snow Maiden, fearing the sun's treacherous heat, but melting to mortal love; and Iolanta, blind from birth and gaining her sight only when she faces the reality of her lovelife.
Although the worldly Netrebko stretches our credibility in some of the more innocent girlish roles, her singing is a revelation.
And it is not difficult to believe that conductor Valery Gergiev had a hand in the choice of material, giving ample opportunity for the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre to shine. And shine they do, whether in the liquid woodwind solos of the Glinka's cavatina or the rapturous climaxes of the Letter Scene from Eugene Onegin.
There is a smattering of kitsch here, in a Tchaikovsky Romance - dressed up with clicking castanets by composer Elena Firsova - and two Rachmaninov songs. Rachmaninov fans might find more rewards in a short but passionate aria from his 1905 opera Francesca da Rimini.
The album is not all Netrebko. One of the most effective tracks, a sequence from Prokofiev's War and Peace, has her as a splendid Natasha, torn between the loves of Anatol and Andrei. The soprano and her three Mariinsky colleagues are in dashing accord, working around and over a mordant waltz that could have slipped from Romeo and Juliet.
* Anna Netrebko, Russian Album (Deutsche Grammophon 477 6384)
