Marking the People’s Artist of Russia’s anniversary
One autumn day in 1972 the audience that filled the Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona gave a hearty welcome to Yevgenia Gorokhovskaya, prize-winner at the Francisco Viñas In ternational Singing Contest and recipient of the Gold Medal.
This success was to a great extent predetermined by her years of serious study at the Leningrad State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire, from which the singer graduated in 1969 (class of Professor T. N. Lavrova), and her victory at the All-Union Glinka Vocalists’ Competition in Vilnius in 1971. Until 1976 Yevgenia Gorokhovskaya was a soloist with the Maly Opera and Ballet Theatre (today the Mikhailovsky Theatre). In 1976 the singer was invited to join the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre (today the Mariinsky Theatre).
The singer’s repertoire at the Mariinsky Theatre includes: Marina Mnishek (Boris Godunov), Marfa (Khovanshchina), Polina and the Countess (The Queen of Spades), Larina (The Eugene Onegin), Hélène Bezukhova and Princess Mary (War and Peace), Plyushkin (Rodion Shchedrin’s Dead Souls), Eboli (Don Carlo), Amneris (Aida), Azucena (Il trovatore), Siébel (Faust), Emilia (Otello), Konchakovna (Prince Igor), Blanche (The Gambler), the Third Lady (Die Zauberflöte), the Mistress of the In n and Xenia’s Nurse (Boris Godunov), Suzuki (Madama Butterfly) and the Heavenly Voice (Parsifal).
This enviably incomplete list of roles sung at the Maly Opera House also includes the roles of Lyubasha (The Tsar’s Bride), Lel (The Snow Maiden), Ganna (May Night), Clytemnestra (Iphigenia in Aulis) and Varvara (Rodion Shchedrin’s Not Love Alone). The singer’s supple and unusually pliant mezzo-soprano voice and the breadth of her range were noted when she was still a student, appearing to great acclaim as Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro at the conservatoire’s Opera Studio. One of few to do so, Gorokhovskaya has performed as Rosina in Rossini’s original rarely-performed mezzo-soprano tessitura version of Il barbiere di Siviglia.
The singer’s most dazzling role is that of Dido in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, sung on the concert stage (at the Small Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic). In her chamber music programmes Gorokhovskaya has presented pearls of Russian and world classical romances – ranging from Glinka and Dargomyzhsky to Taneyev and Rachmaninoff, from Schubert and Liszt to Grieg and de Falla.
Monumental works in the cantata-oratorio genre in Gorokhovskaya’s repertoire include Bach’s Johannes-Passion and Matthäus-Passion, Handel’s oratorio Samson, Mozart and Verdi’s Requiems, Mahler’s Second and Third Symphonies and Lied von der Erde, Scriabin’s First Symphony and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata and Ivan the Terrible oratorio.
The roles in operas by Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitry Kabalevsky, Andrei Petrov, Rodion Shchedrin, Alexander Kholminov and Mieczysław Weinberg have all been enriched by the singer’s arsenal of vocal methods through contemporary intonations.
Her performance of Dmitry Shostakovich’s song cycle Six Verses by Marina Tsvetaeva proved a veritable artistic revelation. Romances and ballades by Lucian Prigozhin, a cycle by Boris Tishchenko to verse by Tsvetaeva and Valery Gavrilin’s Russian Notebook have frequently appeared in Gorokhovskaya’s concerts and been recorded. Yevgenia Gorokhovskaya has produced a new version of Sergei Slonimsky’s cantata A Voice from the Chorus set to verse by Alexander Blok. Veniamin Basner’s song cycle Eight Poems by Anna Akhmatova was first performed by and dedicated to her. One of her most significant debuts came with the heartfelt solo and vocal-choreographic symphony Pushkin by Andrei Petrov.
While preparing for the international vocalists’ competition in Barcelona Yevgenia Gorokhovskaya happily met with the accompanist Irina Golovneva, a great pianist who is a contemplative and subtle artiste. Equally important for Gorokhovskaya were her meetings at the Mariinsky Theatre over the years with the outstanding present-day conductors Yuri Temirkanov and Valery Gergiev.
Many of the pages of her chamber music programmes remind us that Gorokhovskaya is a born opera singer who has the ability to create an integral, pliant, musical and dramatic image. Even in chamber music she frequently stands apart for her strong, vibrant colours and theatricality. On the other hand, the refined graphics and watercolour hues of romance-like lyricism have a flavour of the precisely drawn lines of operatic roles and attention to the tiniest of psychological details. Every facet of her incredibly diverse repertoire, every facet of her artistic gift – like the facets of a diamond – appear in impeccable justification as a performer.
Iosif Raiskin
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