As Russian evenings go, it ran a compact hour and 45 minutes, without intermission — no caviar, no champagne, no ice cream in the Majestic lobby. The house was respectable but far from capacity. The curtain rose on a floor-to-ceiling blow-up of the familiar 1916 photograph of Diaghilev in top hat, and out came Lithuanian dancers Olga Konosenko and Nerijus Juska to do the Armide pas de deux, in their Alexandre Benois re-creations looking much like the photos of Pavlova and Nijinsky as Armide and her favorite slave, Konosenko in a pink dress over white tulle, Juska in a pink skirted jacket over knee breeches and white stockings and with a white plumed turban (though here the breeches, in red-and-white hoops, looked more like the bottom of an old-fashioned bathing suit). The pas de deux started out charming and flirtatious, with Konosenko on pointe leaning back into Juska with a coy glance, and grew in flamboyance, but the moves remained modest: a big tour jeté here, a modest manège there, a few fouettés thrown in, the emphasis on graceful arcs and direct expression. It was like commedia dell’arte ballet. At the end, Konosenko and Juska emerged from opposite wings and ran past each other, he whisking a pink tulle scarf from her hands.
As a reciter of his own work, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, now 74 but still spry, is a stand-up stitch, and he kept with the color motif by sporting, under his linen suit, a white shirt with pink collar and cuffs; his tie flashed splotches of bright yellow. It was a good idea to have actor and opera singer John King read “Sleep My Beloved” in English before Yevtushenko recited; this allowed us to focus on his cadence and the way his right hand shaped and caressed the words as he walked back and forth, occasionally going to the podium and addressing King or picking out individuals in the audience. Before the reading/recitation of “The City of Yes and the City of No,” he pointed out that there has been much debate as to the poem’s meaning and advised us, “You guess. It’s a free country. Everybody gets to have an opinion.” At times his intensity was too much for his mic, and his Siberian accent — for which he apologized — minimized the intelligibility of his English recitation (King having departed) of “I Live in the Country Sort Of,” though the “sorta, kinda” idea was clear enough. He was an odd choice for a Ballets Russes evening, his social-conscience poetry a product of Stalinist Russia and not the least bit redolent of early-20th-century Paris — but he’s an engaging entertainer, and if you want a famous living Russian poet, he’s it.
Gulnara Zanova Mitzanova, we were then told, would sing not Konchakovna’s cavatina but “three romances.” Alla Kachan’s piano accompaniment suggested variously Borodin and Rachmaninov, and the songs seemed to be about yearning love; Mitzanova’s tone was lustrous, and she sang with dramatic expressiveness. Anton Belov, who has degrees from New England Conservatory and Juilliard, sounded more like a bass in his three Chaliapin selections: the cavatina from Rachmaninov’s Aleko, Feodor Keneman’s “When the King Went Forth to War,” and the folk song “Nochenka” (“Night”), which Dmitri Hvorostovsky sang this past December in Symphony Hall. Belov has Russian black earth at the bottom of his voice and a lot of variety, as when he turned stealthy at the end of the Keneman. The curtain came down briefly and then rose to disclose John Macurdy seated on a throne. At 79, the former Met star is even older than Yevtushenko, and he doesn’t have the deep gravel of the traditional Russian bass, but the vocal power was remarkable. At the piano, Kachan seemed challenged by the Rachmaninov cavatina, but she conveyed a hushed drama (with liturgical overtones) for “Nochenka” and a palpable sense of the Kremlin bells ringing in the Mussorgsky.
