Russian soprano Tamara Milashkina died in January at 89 years old, and Chris’s Cache remembers her with the performance I most identify with her—a 1977 Salzburg Iolanta with her husband Vladimir Atlantov as Robert—along with a much more recent performance of my favorite Tchaikovsky opera with last week’s podcast headliner Asmik Grigorian conducted by Kirill Petrenko.

I posted another Iolanta on Trove Thursday five years ago and rhapsodized then about my experiences with this opera.

I’ll simply add that Asmik’s father Gegam can be heard in the complete performance included in that earlier post.

I’ve been missing Russian opera as the Met hasn’t performed any this season and next season Pikovaya Dama doesn’t arrive until late May, so Chris’s Cache will be devoting an occasional installment over the next few months to this rich repertoire.

Tchaikovsky: Iolanta

Iolanta: Tamara Milashkina
Vaudemont: Zurab Sotkilava
Robert: Vladimir Atlantov
King René: Yevgeny Nesterenko
Ebn-Hakia: Yuri Grigoryev

Conductor: Leopold Hager
Salzburg
22 October 1977
In-house recording

Iolanta: Asmik Grigorian
Vaudemont: Liparit Avetisyan
Robert: Igor Golovatenko
King René: Mika Kares
Ibn-Hakia: Michael Kraus

Rundfunkchor Berlin
Berliner Philharmoniker
Conductor: Kirill Petrenko
Philharmonie, Berlin
15 January 2022
Broadcast

Milashkina and Atlantov can also be heard in earlier podcast episodes of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the latter from the Bolshoi Opera’s 1975 visit to the Met, the only occasions the soprano sang at Lincoln Center.

Each Iolanta can be downloaded by clicking on the icon of a cloud with an arrow pointing downward on the audio player above and the resulting mp3 file will appear in your download directory.

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