Olga Makarina

Its season of concert opera at Carnegie Hall completed, Eve Queler’s Opera Orchestra of New York (OONY) presented Russian lyric coloratura soprano Olga Makarina in recital at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall on April 29. Makarina has sung leading roles in OONY’s “La Juive” (Eudoxie) and “Les Huguenots” (Marguerite de Valois) in recent seasons and made appearances with the New York City Opera and Metropolitan Opera companies as well. Russian pianist Yelena Kurdina, of the Metropolitan Opera, was the assisting artist. Makarina sang music that a Russian-born bel canto singer might be expected to sing, but there were also welcome surprises among the Italian, French and Russian Romantic-era pieces that she programmed.

Makarina began the evening with a varied group of Gaetano Donizetti songs. Singing lyrically and soulfully, she opened with an elegiac “Amore e morte” (“Love and death”) and contrasted it with an airy “A mezzanotte” (“At midnight”), a serenade with a florid refrain and Kurdina’s bouncy accompaniment. The soprano capped an intense, wide-ranging “La zingara” (“The gypsy”) with a climactic cadenza with echo effects. She continued in a similar vein with a heartfelt “Io son la rea” (“I am the guilty one”), a confession and prayer, from Giovanni Pacini’s opera “La Vestale” (“The Vestal Virgin”), in the spirit of music from Vincenzo Bellini’s “ ;Norma.”

Following this bel canto group, the singer, who is moving into more purely lyric and almost spinto repertory, such as Mozart’s Pamina, on the one hand, and Verdi’s Desdemona, on the other, gave greater vocal weight to high-Romantic songs of Franz Liszt, starting with a lush “Oh! Quand je dors!” (“Oh! When I sleep”), which mentions 14^th Century poet Petrarch. She proceeded to Liszt’s “Tre sonetti di Petrarca” (“Three Petrarch sonnets”), often the province of Italian tenors. She handily encompassed both the dramatic and lyrical singing that “Pace non trovo” (“I find no peace”) demands and caressed the lines of the dulcet “Benedetto sia ‘l giorno” (“Blessed be the day”) and “I’ vidi in terra angelici costumi” (“I beheld on earth angelic grace”).

Turning to Russian repertory, Makarina delivered a vibrant “Night Zephyr,” a Spanish-style serenade by Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky and reveled in the swelling Slavic bel canto of Mickael Glinka’s “Barcarole,” to which she brought her expertise in early 19^th Century Italian music. She tripped breathlessly through Glinka’s rapid-fire “Travel Song,” depicting a train ride toward a loved one’s land. She proved fully at home with the Eastern strains and melismas of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Oriental Romance,” kin to music for his Queen of Shemakha in “Le Coq d’Or” (“The Golden Cockerel”), and in Sergei Rachmaninov’s “Do not sing, beautiful, for me.” Makarina juxtaposed an impassioned “To forget so soon,” Peter Illych Tchaikovsky’s dramatic song about a love extinguished, with a graceful account of his more peaceful “It happened in the early spring.”

Makarina sang in some performances of Bellini’s “Il Pirata” (“The Pirate”) at the Met last season and her encore here was a dramatically persuasive “Col sorriso d’innocenza” (“With the smile of innocence”), the heroine, Imogene’s final cavatina, and she moved with ease through its high-lying line.

Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall

57^th Street, off 7 ^th Avenue