Mikhail Alexandrovich - Prisoner of the Caucasus

Mikhail Alexandrovich (1914-2002) was a gifted Latvian tenor whose remarkable seven decade career encompassed many different musical genres, from opera to Hebrew liturgical music. Born to a poor Jewish family in the town of Bērzpils, Vitebsk, he was encouraged by his music loving father, who recognized his son’s talent, and sent him to the Conservatory in Riga in 1920. By age 9, Alexandrovich was touring Eastern Europe professionally, and the fees he earned helped to lift his family out of poverty. At age 12, the boy decided to curtail his appearances in order to concentrate on his education. In his teens, he began studies with Reya Ratner at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. It was Ratner who helped the young man with the changing voice make the transition from alto to lyric tenor. After concentrating on cantorial studies, the young tenor won a competition which earned him a part time position at Manchester, England’s Central Synagogue. The income he earned allowed him to begin studies with Beniamino Gigli in Rome, where the two worked together periodically for the next few years. Alexandrovich spent much of this period touring the concert halls of Italy, Austria, Germany, Poland and France. After returning to Latvia in 1936, he worked as a cantor in Riga as well as in Kovno, Lithuania. The concert work continued, and he also appeared with the Lithuanian Opera. At 5 foot 2 and with a small voice, Alexandrovich was aware of his limits and confined his operatic work to a handful of roles, namely Nemorino in L'Elisir d'Amore, Lindoro in L’Italiana in Algeri, Almaviva in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Ernesto in Don Pasquale, Alfredo in La Traviata, Lensky in Eugen Onegin, and the Prince in Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka.

By the early 1940s, Alexandrovich had become one of the most popular tenors in the Soviet Union. His recordings sold in the millions, and he earned phenomenal sums for his public appearances. He was invited to the Caucasus to sing for Georgian soldiers and spent much of the war singing for the morale of the Russian forces. For his service, Alexandrovich was awarded numerous medals from the Soviet government, including the Stalin Prize. Despite his remarkable success at home, Alexandrovich longed for a career abroad. Multiple requests for exit visas were turned down by Soviet officials and the tenor began to grow frustrated. His desire to emigrate was not viewed favorably. The Soviet government regarded his request to leave as ingratitude…and that was when the trouble started. The concert engagements dried up. His records disappeared from stores. Alexandrovich had become a non-person. Luckily, Golda Meir intervened on the tenor’s behalf and an exit visa was finally granted in 1971. The aging tenor was forced to leave most of his personal fortune behind. He was now free, but poor.

Alexandrovich spent the next two years in Israel, officiating at Tel Aviv’s Ramat Gan Synagogue. With its limited funds, however, the temple was unable to pay the tenor a living wage. Luckily, he was allowed to travel, and made his U.S. debut in a New York Town Hall recital on December 16, 1972. Further appearances in Philadelphia, Boston, Syracuse, Baltimore, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Miami brought in much needed income for Alexandrovich. After moving to the U.S. in 1973, Alexandrovich continued concertizing and sometimes acted as cantor at Toronto’s Beth David Synagogue. With the fall of the Soviet Union, he travelled to Moscow for a series of sold out concerts. He relocated to Munich in 1990 and remained quite active, giving his final concert on May 26, 1997 in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Nearly blind and deaf in his final years, Alexandrovich passed away in Munich on July 3, 2002, just shy of his 88th birthday.

Mikhail Alexandrovich’s three quarter century singing career is one for the record books. Although his limited vocal resources and small stature essentially shut him out of a full scale operatic career, he was one of Russia’s most popular concert artists. Later in life, he managed to overcome the anti-Semitic hatred of his homeland to cultivate an impressive series of international appearances, writing a fitting final chapter to an already stellar career. Alexandrovich made over 70 recordings for Gramplasttrest, Ligo and Melodiya in the U.S.S.R. and later for RCA. These recordings reveal a tenore di grazia, used resourcefully and with great artistry. Here, Alexandrovich, in one of his finest recordings, gives an epic performance of “The Prisoner’s Aria” from Cui’s Prisoner of the Caucasus. This was recorded in the U.S.S.R. in 1952.

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