‘I sing for myself,” Carmen insists, and you believe it when Aigul Akhmetshina sings her – as the 28-year-old mezzo-soprano from rural Bashkortostan has done at the Royal Opera and the Met in the past few months alone; this week she takes over at Glyndebourne, too. A striking aspect of her debut solo recording, which unsurprisingly kicks off with three extracts from Bizet’s opera, is how at ease with herself she sounds: her insouciance is irresistible.
The most arresting thing, though, is her voice. It’s glowingly expansive in Charlotte’s soliloquy from Massenet’s Werther, poised and electric as Rossini’s caged Rosina, entreating and then swaggering as Bellini’s Romeo, with big high notes any soprano would be proud of. She turns Cinderella’s vocal cartwheels in the run-up to the final aria of Rossini’s La Cenerentola as easily as if she were picking them out on a piano keyboard. She has sterling support in the Carmen extracts from singers including Freddie de Tommaso as Don José, and throughout from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Daniele Rustioni, although the chorus isn’t ideally blended in the mix. As an encore we get a Bashkir folk song in an arrangement so sumptuous the orchestra almost draws focus from her beautifully embellished melody – but not quite.
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