In tightness, but not in silence

At the Tchaikovsky Competition, the vocalists finished the auditions of the first round last. Of the 65 participants, 25 semi-finalists were determined. Representatives of China, South Korea, Uzbekistan and Belarus will compete with 18 Russians. Tells Vladimir Dudin.

For the third time in a row, auditions for vocalists in the Solo Singing nomination are being held at the smallest and acoustically most uncomfortable venue – Mussorgsky’s chamber hall, one of many similar ones at the Mariinsky-2, which are most suitable only for recording sessions. In Mariinsky-3, with its best acoustics in the country, which could definitely be used once every four years for the needs of the country’s main competition, the events of the Stars of the White Nights festival continue to take place. And, it would seem, the owner of the competition, Valery Gergiev, in his operatic patrimony, certainly should not save on the nerves of young singers, who, instead of a comfortable, acoustically ideal space, get a very “dry” studio hall, where the sound has nowhere to fly. Moreover, even if the jury in such a hall can hear the flaws of the contestants more closely, it is more difficult to determine the quality of the performance, since the capabilities of an opera singer are evaluated according to the formula “voice + space”.

The colossal difficulty for the singers lies in the fact that there is no stage in the Mussorgsky Hall, there is no normal distance between the performer and the listener: the contestants, finding themselves on a small patch, head-on, eye-to-eye, collide with a random audience. Therefore, the chances for a more winning performance arise for those who are better acquainted with this hall, and nine young soloists of the Mariinsky Theater became such at the competition (and Gergiev’s right hand, pianist Irina Soboleva, artistic director of the Primorsky Stage, who strictly guards the interests of the boss, sits on the jury) . But the contestants had no choice, and each of them fought to the best of their individual adaptive mechanisms.

The international nature of the competition this year has given a strong failure: not only there are no once traditional European and Ukrainian participants from Europe and Ukraine, but even singers from Belarus did not dare to come at this alarming time.

The main competition for the Russians was the Chinese, Koreans and Mongols – which, by the way, has happened in a regular way over many competitions of the past decades. Americans and European singers have long ceased to be seriously interested in Russian vocal competitions in droves, if we do not keep in mind isolated cases. The main stumbling block for them was the repertoire in difficult Russian, the second reason was the lobbying of the judicial system. This time, too, the latter did not go without, when most of the participants from among the scholarship holders of the American Atkins Young Artists Program, which has existed at the Mariinsky Theater since 2015, made it to the semi-finals; at the same time, several much more worthy participants were left out.

On the whole, the average performance level of the competition, albeit with a stretch, showed a movement towards diversity of the repertoire, where a lot of Handel, Haydn, a rare Mozart, Bach appeared, with a certain increase in attention to languages ​​on the part of Russians.

There were much fewer screaming singers – although the audience did not hide their love for the loud singing that sometimes burst through, immediately bursting into stunned applause.

In addition to Irina Soboleva, the jury consists of five Russian singers, two Italians (the head of his own artistic agency Alessandro Ariosi, who listens to tours online, and choirmaster Marletta Markovalerio), a pianist from Ulan-Ude, a Chinese vocal professor and a great friend of Russian singers, American coach Craig Rutenberg. This collegium missed nine women in the semi-finals, but there are much more men – sixteen. Of these, five are basses, five are tenors (one of them, Mikhail Basenko, who has been doing vocals for only seven years, got a ticket to the second round in a very generous advance), the rest are baritones.

Of the male semi-finalists, three basses drew special attention: 26-year-old Konstantin Fedotov from the Chuvash village of Sabanchino with a voice of rare natural power, the no less gifted stately Hou Liwei from China and soloist of the Mariinsky Theater bass Gleb Peryazev, who showed himself to be a very carefully trained competitive player and with striking brilliance presented the program of the first round. Among the tenors, the undisputed leader was the Korean Song Chi-hoon, who blew everyone away with his Olympic passion in Ramiro’s virtuoso aria “Si, ritrovarla io giuro” from Rossini’s Cinderella.

There has never been a shortage of sopranos, as well as baritones, at competitions, but the mezzo-soprano, as it was, remains a rare voice. This year, out of the few representatives of this role, Zinaida Tsarenko from Khabarovsk, a student of Olga Kondina, declared herself the brightest. Tall, with the posture and look of a queen, she bribed from the very first notes with some unearthly, out-of-date integrity, recalling the art of her predecessors like Kathleen Farrier, Tatyana Troyanos, Janet Baker with her beauty of timbre, musicality and subtlety of her performing manner.

There was no chance for the vocalists to take a deep breath after the stresses of the first round. Back to back with the initial stage, the very next day after its completion, the semi-finals started, the results of which will be summed up on Sunday evening.