On 24 October the performance of The Tale of Tsar Saltan will be dedicated to Rimma Volkova, People’s Artist of Russia.
People’s Artist of Russia Rimma Stepanovna Volkova was born in Ashkhabad. Her childhood during the war and the post-war years of hunger was spent in the village of Belozere, Ulyanovsk Region. In 1962, after graduating from the Stavropol School of Music, the future Kirov Theatre soloist entered the Kazan Conservatoire (class of senior lecturer Ye. A. Abrosimova).
In 1965 she received a diploma at the All-Union Glinka Competition in Moscow and, one year later, an Honorary Certificate at the International Tchaikovsky Competition (the first time it featured vocalists).
Volkova’s unusually pure voice, smooth in every register and with its warm and beautiful timbre, drew the attention not just of audiences. At that time, the jury member and outstanding composer Georgy Sviridov noted the singer’s staggering vocal talent, expressing his conviction that she had a glittering artistic career ahead of her.
These words of the great musician, who had a brilliant knowledge of the workings of the human voice and its potential, were to prove prophetic: in the autumn of 1967 the singer was received into the trainee group of the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre in Leningrad, subsequently becoming a soloist. She made her debut in the minor role of Prilepa in The Queen of Spades before being entrusted with two more important roles – those of Antonida in Glinka’s opera Ivan Susanin and Marfa in Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tsar’s Bride.
In her twenty-six-year-long stage career at the Kirov Theatre, Rimma Volkova performed almost every lyrical coloratura soprano role in the theatre’s repertoire. Images of idealised femininity were subtly embodied in her performances of the roles of Lyudmila in Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, Marfa in The Tsar’s Bride, the Princess-Swan in The Tale of Tsar Saltan and Volkhova in Sadko by Rimsky-Korsakov, Violetta in La traviata and Gilda in Rigoletto by Verdi and Lucia di Lammermoor in the eponymous opera by Donizetti. She had the opportunity to work with musicians including Sergei Yeltsin, Konstantin Simeonov, Valery Gergiev, Boris Shtokolov, Yevgeny Nesterenko, Galina Kovaleva, Nikša Bareza and Boris Khaikin. From 1967 Rimma Volkova frequently toured abroad to Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, Spain, Egypt, Brazil and Mongolia.
Chamber music represents a particular chapter in the career of Rimma Volkova. Here she always prioritised Russian and German composers. Starting in 1985 she also discovered for herself and introduced audiences to vocal works by Russian composers dating from the mid-18th to the early 19th centuries. This is music of the Imperial Court and music of aristocratic estates. It breathed new life into the music of the composers Vasily Pashkevich, Mikhail Sokolovsky and Dmitry Bortnyansky as well as bringing to light unknown works by Countess Тatiana Tolstaya, Prince Nikolai Yusupov, the Counts Sheremetev and Princess Yelizaveta Kochubei. One particular merit in Rimma Volkova’s renaissance of Russian chamber music lies in the fact that she revived the repertoire of the celebrated singer Anastasia Vyaltseva.
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