OUT OF SIBERIA.(baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky)(Interview)(Biography)

On a typical winter day in central Siberia in the mid-nineteen-eighties, with below-zero temperatures, a young opera star, the twenty-two-year-old baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, gave a recital at a bread factory several hours by train from his native town of Krasnoyarsk. Since even in such provincial settings Russian concert protocol demands full regalia, Hvorostovsky, a soprano colleague, and their accompanist had changed into formal dress behind a screen in the unheated auditorium. As the chilled musicians, wreathed in great clouds of their own breath, finished their numbers--Tchaikovsky and some bel-canto arias of Verdi and Bellini--they couldn't help noticing that most ...