...an heiress to the greatest individualities of the operatic stage who take their repertoire as the universe and who aligned their range with its parallels and meridians. The young singer attracted common attention at the 10th International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1994 – the jury unanimously awarded the graduate of the Moscow Conservatory (and later its postgraduate student) where she studied under professor Irina Maslennikova and professor Yevgenia Arefieva was unanimously awarded the Grand Prix (before that, there were silver medals of the Rimsky-Korsakov Competition in St. Petersburg and the Francisco Viñas Contest in Barcelona, as well as the 3rd prize of the Verdian Voices in Busseto). A year later, Hibla Gerzmava became a lead soloist of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre where she has sung the leading parts. Hibla Gerzmava today is a People's Artist of Russia and Abkhazia, a winner of the Golden Mask, Casta Diva, Triumph and Golden Orpheus prizes, a prize of Moscow as the best female singer of the year (2001), and a welcome guest of the best operatic and concert stages of the world. The singer has performed at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, the Wiener Staatsoper, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, Covent Garden and Metropolitan Opera, the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Palais Garnier Opera House and the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, the Teatro Comunale di Firenze in Florence, the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, and the Bunka Kaikan in Tokyo. The singer's appearance with a closing song of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi is one of the most important events of her career. The singer has hosted the Hibla Gerzmava Invites Festival in her native Abkhazia since 2001 (it took place for the first time in Moscow earlier this year) with the participation of outstanding Russian and foreign musicians. Hibla Gerzmava has collaborated with Ekaterina Ganelina, a pianist and Honoured Artist of the Republic of Abkhazia, for many years now. Their creative acquaintance took place when they were students of the Moscow Conservatory. Ganelina studied piano under professor Vera Gornostayeva and completed her postgraduate concertmaster course under professor M. Smirnov. She has accompanied singers at prestigious international competitions such as the Tchaikovsky and Bella Voce competitions in Moscow, Amber Nightingale in Kaliningrad, and been awarded the best concertmaster diploma several times. The pianist has taken part in Russian and international music festivals combining an active concert career with teaching at her Alma Mater at the concertmaster art department. This album recorded by Hibla Gerzmava and Ekaterina Ganelina is in a way an outcome of their long joint work. Romances by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev's cycle based on the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Myaskovsky's vocal suite which was actually revived by the singer have been performed at their concerts in Russia and overseas on a number of occasions. Here, Hibla Gerzmava fully unveils the most impressive and eventful period of Russian music in its chamber vocal perspective. Of all the variety of Tchaikovsky's romance heritage, the singer turns to the romances which they commonly name “the composer's lyrical diary” – elegiac monologues tinged with “confessionary” or contemplative colours. She interprets Tchaikovsky's Lullaby with a special, sincere feeling (the singer was awarded Elena Obraztsova's special prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition for its performance). This line continues with Rachmaninoff's “landscape” romances with their sensitive interpretation of emotional responses of a soul to the beauty of the world around us. The composer turns the genre of chamber miniature into a sort of a vocal and piano poem where the part of the piano reveals the entire splendid colour palette being already an equal “ally” of the signing voice. Six Songs, Op. 38 (1916), Rachmaninoff's last and the most “modernistic” chamber opus finished on the eve of the revolution demonstrates a quite opposite side of the composer's music. Turning to the poems from the Silver Age of Russian poetry by Konstantin Balmont, Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Valery Bryusov, Igor Severyanin and Fyodor Sologub, the composer plunges in poetic metaphors of symbolism. The creative path of Nikolai Myaskovsky, a composer of a different generation, began in the same environment. Romances based on the texts of contemporary poets predominate among his early works. His vocal suite Madrigal, Op. 7 (1908-1909) was not an exception. In 1925, when the composer was preparing the cycle for publishing, he preserved the refined expressiveness of his early style which created an amazing parallel to Balmont's verses and described the musical atmosphere of the time so vividly. Prokofiev's cycle Five Poems of Anna Akhmatova was written almost at the same time with Rachmaninoff's Six Songs. The composer infrequently turned to the genre of romance, but his Akhmatova cycle ranks among the best achievements of his first period along with the Classical Symphony, Scythian Suite and Visions fugitives. An amazingly clear and transparent sound of this music combined with fine psychological nuances as performed by Hibla Gerzmava and Ekaterina Ganelina suddenly highlights the most important vector of Prokofiev's music – his aspiration for “new simplicity” which was fully showcased in his elegiac lyricism of the latter years on the one hand, and continuity of the classical traditions of Russian chamber vocal lyrical music on the other.
