When the Demon Sang One Last Time: Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s Unforgettable Demon in Moscow, 2015

The lights dimmed inside Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Concert Hall on a frigid February night in 2015. Outside, the city was still wrapped in winter, snow muffling the streets, the cold biting through every overcoat. Inside, however, a storm of another kind was about to rise — not of snow or wind, but of music, poetry, and one of the greatest voices Russia had ever produced.

The orchestra tuned. The curtain lifted. And then — the Demon entered.

But this was no ordinary performance. This was Dmitri Hvorostovsky — the Siberian baritone whose silver hair, molten voice, and commanding presence had conquered the world’s greatest opera houses. By 2015, he was already a living legend, beloved from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to London’s Covent Garden. Yet here, on his home soil, singing Anton Rubinstein’s rarely performed opera The Demon, he seemed less like a singer and more like a myth come to life.

A Poem Brought to Flesh and Blood

Rubinstein’s Demon, based on Mikhail Lermontov’s haunting narrative poem, is no gentle tale. Written between 1829 and 1839, Lermontov’s work is about a fallen angel, cast out of heaven, wandering the earth in torment. He longs for love, yet every touch of his hand brings destruction. It is a story of desire and damnation, of beauty colliding with eternal exile.

For a singer like Hvorostovsky, it was destiny. His voice carried that same contradiction — velvet and steel, tenderness wrapped in unrelenting power. From the very first note of Act III, when he appeared as the Demon confronting Tamara, the doomed princess sung that night by Amik Grigoryan, the audience felt time collapse. It wasn’t 2015 anymore. It was 19th-century Russia. It was every age at once — the story of a soul cursed to wander, sung by a man whose own life carried the shadows of fate.

The Cast Around Him

The performance was no solo star turn. Igor Morozov brought nobility to the role of Prince Sinodal, Vadim Volkov sang the Angel with crystalline purity, and Alexandr Tsimbalyuk thundered as Gudal, Tamara’s father. Every singer added color to the canvas. The Svetlanov State Orchestra, under the baton of Mikhail Tatarnikov, gave Rubinstein’s score a blazing urgency, while stage director Dmitri Bertman conjured an atmosphere heavy with gothic foreboding.

But there was no denying it: all eyes, all ears, all hearts were fixed on Hvorostovsky.

The Man Behind the Voice

To watch him sing The Demon was to witness not just a performance, but an incarnation. His frame was regal, his face sculpted like marble, his every gesture infused with tragic grandeur. And when the voice came — that bronze-colored baritone — it seemed less like sound and more like a force of nature.

But beneath the grandeur was fragility. Unknown to many in the audience that night, Hvorostovsky was already beginning to feel the first shadows of illness. Just a few months later, in June 2015, he would announce to the world that he had been diagnosed with brain cancer. Suddenly, in hindsight, the Demon took on another meaning. The torment he sang of was not only Lermontov’s fallen angel. It was his own body turning against him, even as his spirit soared higher than ever.

Act III — Where Heaven and Earth Collide

The third act of Rubinstein’s opera is where the Demon’s fate is sealed. He declares his love for Tamara with terrifying passion, promising her kingdoms, eternity, anything she could desire. She is both terrified and entranced. Their voices entwine, hers trembling, his booming with otherworldly conviction.

On February 2, 2015, as Hvorostovsky sang these lines, one could hear not just the story of a character, but the cry of a man who understood longing and mortality in equal measure. The audience sat frozen, not daring to breathe, as he unleashed the full power of his voice. It wasn’t just music. It was confession. It was prophecy.

And when Vadim Volkov’s Angel entered to banish the Demon, Hvorostovsky’s collapse onto the stage was so convincing, so utterly real, that it felt less like theater and more like a glimpse into eternity.

A Homecoming, a Farewell

For Hvorostovsky, this performance was more than another stop on his world career. It was a homecoming. He was back in Moscow, singing in Russian, embodying one of Russian literature’s most tragic antiheroes. The audience knew it too — they applauded not just for the beauty of the music, but for the son of their soil who had carried Russian art onto the world stage and returned now, larger than life.

No one could have known that within three years, he would be gone. No one could have known that this Demon would stand among his last great stage triumphs. And yet, listening to the recordings that remain, it is impossible not to hear the sense of finality, of destiny. He gave everything that night — his technique, his artistry, his very soul.

Beyond Music

What makes this performance unforgettable is not only the sheer beauty of the singing. It is what it symbolized: two great Russian artists — Lermontov and Rubinstein — meeting their ultimate interpreter in a man who embodied both the pride and the sorrow of his nation.

Hvorostovsky’s Demon was not a villain, nor merely a tragic figure. He was human — flawed, yearning, magnificent, broken, yet defiantly alive. Just as Dmitri himself was: a man who had risen from the icy streets of Krasnoyarsk to the world’s greatest stages, who had fought demons of his own — addiction, illness, the brutal hand of fate — and yet had never surrendered his gift.

The Legacy

Looking back now, nearly a decade later, that night in Moscow feels almost sacred. The Tchaikovsky Concert Hall was not just a venue. It became a temple, and the audience became witnesses to something greater than art. They saw a man give himself completely to his role, to his country, to his music, even as time was slipping away from him.

When Dmitri Hvorostovsky passed in November 2017, tributes poured in from every corner of the globe. But for those who sat in the hall on February 2, 2015, they had already witnessed their farewell. They had seen him as the Demon, the angel fallen, the voice defying death itself.

And that is how we should remember him — not as a man defeated by illness, but as an artist who, even in his final years, sang with such force and beauty that the world stopped to listen.

For one night in Moscow, Dmitri Hvorostovsky was not just the Demon of Lermontov’s imagination. He was the very embodiment of art’s power to transcend mortality. The snow fell outside. The stage lights dimmed. And still, his voice echoes — eternal, untamed, unforgettable.