It's surprising enough that a tenor capable of making such an excellent recording should be as
completely forgotten as Mikhail Voskresenskij; it's all the more surprising since Russia is so great at remembering her singers:
encyclopedias on Soviet and on Russian singers in general were (in printed form) and are (online) plenty, and few singers are not
included in any of them.
Well, Voskresenskij is one of those few; his name shows up exclusively in the context of the world premiere of Darvazskoe
ushchelye (The gorge of Darvaz) by Lev Stepanov, which took place in 1939 at the Stanislavskij and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater
in Moscow, with Voskresenskij in the part of Pavel, whose aria he sings in the above recording – which seems to be his only
one, by the way. (The opera is a rather deterrent example of Soviet propaganda. The aria text reads, among others: "We learned the
importance of friendship in 1917. That year, the country said 'Long live the Soviets', and the whole people pursued one goal.")
Since the Stanislavskij and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater only worked with their own troupe, not with guests, he
must have been a member of that theater; when exactly, how long, which other roles he sang or what his dates of birth and death were
is all completely unknown. Only for one other role, it's evident that he sang it: there is (see above) a photo in terrible quality
of him as José.
Many thanks to Irina Casutt for transcribing the (otherwise untraceable) aria text from the audio.
