Voice of Russia

Though Western audiences have yet to see him in a proper opera, twenty-eight-year-old Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky has already sent aficionados the world over into a collective swoon, inviting an adulation that recalls the advent of Baryshnikov in the dance world of the seventies. {When Hvorostovsky made his New York debut in March, people were turned away by the hundreds.) It helps that the Siberianborn singer looks like our fantasy of the Slavic artist—sloe-eyed and soulful. But the deeply textured voice and intense phrasing match the Pushkin appearance. Accordingly, anticipation of his Carnegie Hall recital this month is in the high C's.