Moscow celebrates the 80th birthday of opera legend Galina Vishnevskaya with a gala concert and a new singing competition.
Soprano Galina Vishnevskaya surely qualifies as one of the great operatic phenomena of the second half of the 20th century. Combining a clear, radiant and powerful voice with prodigious acting talent and stunning physical beauty, she dazzled audiences at the Bolshoi Theater for over two decades and, following her exile from the Soviet Union, for yet another decade and more on major opera stages of the West.
Next Wednesday marks Vishnevskaya's 80th birthday, and Moscow is celebrating the occasion with a gala evening of music at Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. Leading up to the celebration, the great soprano herself and the opera center that bears her name play host to the First Galina Vishnevskaya International Competition of Operatic Artists, which commenced Oct. 17 and comes to an end next Tuesday with an awards ceremony and concert in the Moscow International House of Music.
Vishnevskaya was born in Leningrad on Oct. 25, 1926, and made her stage debut in 1944 at the Operetta Theater of her native city. Nine years later, she made her bow on the Bolshoi's stage, singing Tatyana in Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin". In the ensuing years, she sang more than 30 other roles at the theater, most notably, perhaps, Aida, in Giuseppe Verdi's opera of the same name, and Natasha in Sergei Prokofiev's "War and Peace".
But disaster struck in the early 1970s, when Vishnevskaya and her husband, famed cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, gave shelter in their dacha to author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. For that sin, in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, both were sent abroad and later stripped of their citizenship (restored in 1990 on orders of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev). Four years ago, Vishnevskaya opened her opera center on Ulitsa Ostozhenka and has since played an active role in its training of young singers for the operatic stage.
Vishnevskaya was originally scheduled to celebrate her birthday at the New Stage of the Bolshoi. But then came the Bolshoi's radical season-opening reinterpretation of "Eugene Onegin". At the premiere on Sept. 1, the final curtain had barely dropped when Vishnevskaya rose from her front-row seat and walked hurriedly to the nearest exit, with an expression on her face that could only be interpreted as one of extreme anger.
And angry she was indeed, composing an open letter the next day to the Bolshoi's management. "To the end of my days", she wrote, "I will not escape my shame at participating in that public desecration of our sacred national treasure", and went on to declare that she would never again set foot in the Bolshoi.
"Everyone has the right to decide where to celebrate his or her birthday", responded the Bolshoi's general director, Anatoly Iksanov. "Some people tend to do it at home". And he promptly scheduled extra performances of the maligned "Eugene Onegin" for the dates left open by the cancellation of Vishnevskaya's birthday gala.
As transferred to Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, "Viva Vishnevskaya" will by no means be the wildly extravagant sort of affair that last November marked the same birthday of Maya Plisetskaya, Vishnevskaya's great contemporary in the Bolshoi's ballet company. It nevertheless promises a truly splendid parade of singing, dancing and instrumental talent.
From St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater will come two of its most renowned singers, mezzo-soprano Larisa Dyadkova and bass Vladimir Ognovenko, both no doubt still remembered by many for their sterling guest performances a decade ago in a Bolshoi premiere of Modest Mussorgsky's "Khovanshchina". With them will be baritone Vladimir Chernov, who began his career at the Mariinsky, but has since sung mainly in opera houses abroad, and the veteran Welsh-Irish tenor Dennis O'Neill, as well as three members of the Bolshoi company: its opera artistic director, soprano Makvala Kasrashvili; tenor Badri Maisuradze; and bass Vladimir Matorin.
To dance at the gala, Vishnevskaya has enlisted perhaps the two most outstanding current Bolshoi ballerinas: Svetlana Zakharova, to be seen as "The Dying Swan", and Maria Alexandrova, who joins the Bolshoi's Nikolai Tsiskaridze in the Adagio duet from Alexander Glazunov's "Raymonda".
Notwithstanding the superb compliment of singers and dancers, the biggest drawing card of the evening could well prove to be superstar violinist Maxim Vengerov, whose very occasional Moscow appearances never fail to draw a packed and cheering house.
The Svetlanov State Symphony Orchestra of Russia, led by Bolshoi conductor Pavel Sorokin, will accompany the proceedings, and the chorus of Helikon Opera joins in the evening's grand finale, the Triumphal Scene from "Aida".
The competition that precedes Wednesday's concert winds up its second round on Friday at the Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Center, with the third and final round scheduled there for Sunday at 6 p.m.
"Ours isn't the usual sort of vocal competition", Vishnevskaya said at a news conference last week. Drawing attention to the words "operatic" and "artists" in the competition's title, she went on to explain that the contestants were not mere singers, but young vocal artists – actors as well as singers – who had already begun their careers on the operatic stage.
The competition's first round found the jury viewing videos of some 217 applicants. From them, 41 were invited to enter the "live" second round. Although the competition is billed as "international", 70 percent of the applications came from Russia, and no less than 30 Russians were among those chosen for the second round. Of the rest, nine came from other parts of the former Soviet Union, while China and Japan rounded out the field with one singer each.
The jury, however, has a truly international flavor. Its 10 members include representatives of Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United States, among them tenor O'Neill and the famed Spanish mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza.
The awards ceremony and closing concert of the First Galina Vishnevskaya International Competition of Operatic Artists takes place on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at MMDM, located at 52 Kosmodamianskaya Naberezhnaya.
Cosmos
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