On December 24, the concert “Puccini’s Musical Images” will star Lidia Zabiliasta, Oleksandr Hurets, Pavlo and Petro Pryimak, Andrii Romanenko, Serhii Pashchuk, Mykhailo Kyryshev, and the chorus and orchestra of the National Opera of Ukraine. This concert will commemorate the 30th anniversary of Zabiliasta’s opera career.
Her name is well known among the opera buffs in Ukraine and far beyond its borders. She has been a great success during the National Opera’s concert tours in many countries and a guest star at prestigious European opera houses; she has been on numerous solo concert tours, every time enchanting the audiences with her singular voice, its flexible timbre, equally strong in all ranges and rich in overtones, her masterful classical bel canto, stage presence, and excellent traditions of the Ukrainian vocal school.
Zabiliasta’s creativity is vivid contribution to the contemporary Ukrainian opera art. Her spectacular debut as Oksana in Hulak-Artemovsky’s A Zaporozhian Cossack Beyond the Danube at the Kyiv Opera was preceded by years of study, first at a college of music in Kirovohrad, then at Kyiv State Conservatory, where her professor was the outstanding singer Zoia Khrystych, and ultimately singing with the Kyiv Chamber Choir conducted by the top-notch professional Viktor Ikonnykov. Later, she won the vocal competition Molodi holosy (Young Voices) and took second place at the Glinka All-Union Vocal Competition.
The first two seasons at the Kyiv Opera were marked by operatic parts and debuts, particularly in Lysenko’s Natalka Poltavka, where Zabiliasta created a bright and penetrating image of a charming village girl. Among the most memorable events in her early career is a period of training at La Scala. It served as another proof of the young singer’s talent. She prepared the leading soprano parties in Puccini’s La Boheme and Madama Butterfly; sang as Elisetta in Cimarosa’s Il Matrimonio Segreto (this opera was planned to be staged in Kyiv), in Verdi’s Requiem, and polished her cantilena technique that even now determines her vocal style and dramatic expressiveness.
The Seventh International Tchaikovsky Competition for Vocalists in Moscow (1982) made her name famous across the world after she won the gold medal (for the first and last time in the history of this competition). Irina Arkhipova, the head of the jury, herself an outstanding singer, soloist with the Bolshoi Theater, said: “The first sounds of Zabiliasta’s voice captivated the audience and the jury. She has a timbre of rare beauty; her voice is warm and silver that tends to unfold in the highest register the way a flower blossoms.”
Incidentally, the Soviet recording company Melodia recorded an LP with Zabiliasta’s competition program, including most sophisticated world classical arias, and the legendary tenor Ivan Kozlovsky invited her to record a duet from A Zaporozhian Cossack beyond the Danube for a documentary.
After the competition the film director Roman Oleksiv offered Zabiliasta the leading part in Spokuta, a screen version of Verykivsky’s opera The Servant Woman based on Shevchenko’s poem, in which she brilliantly portrayed the bereaved Hanna’s inner world, conveying every nuance of this human tragedy.
Under the able guidance of the celebrated conductor Stefan Turchak, she prepared the parts of Maryltsia in Lysenko’s Taras Bulba and Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Zabiliasta’s vocal capacities allow her to handle the most sophisticated parts on the world repertoire. Her Duchess Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore is a case study in dramatic identification and perfect vocal rendition; it is a hymn to the invincible power of love.
Zabiliasta’s Liza in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades and Tatyana in Eugene Onegin are among the most interesting contemporary impersonations. Sparing gestures, she concentrates on their inner world, revealing their pure delicate outlooks, their desire to be open and understandable while being uncompromising in making the final decision. For here there exists only one truth, only one approach to the morals. Yaroslavna in Borodin’s Prince Igor is one of Zabiliasta’s most interesting operatic parts. Hers is a bright, tender, penetrating image of the young princess who carries the crystal clarity of her love and faithfulness through all the ordeals of life and soul, emerging in all her grandeur owing to the singer’s innately faultless vocal and profoundly dramatic performance.
Zabiliasta’s repertoire boasts the most complicated Western European operatic parts, among them the deeply psychological tragic images of Nedda in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin, Mimi in La Boheme, and the title roles in Madama Butterfly and Manon Lescaut — all by Puccini, one of her favorite composers. These parts are so different, requiring a broad vocal range, a nonstandard approach to every character, understanding various styles of composition. Zabiliasta has it all, as evidenced by her Turandot. This incredibly many-sided dramatic, psychological, and above all vocal image of the Chinese princess marks a world opera summit. Even her audiences that seemed to know Zabiliasta’s creative mastery so well seemed to see and hear an altogether different singer. She let her vocal talent blossom complemented with her exceptional professionalism and experience.
Every note, every musical phrase was bewitchingly clear, complete, strikingly expressive, especially in the highest register. Zabiliasta started her career as a chamber singer, and even now she cannot imagine it without concerts. Her chamber programs are marked by an exacting approach to every number. She prefers arias from operas that are not on modern repertoires. She meticulously prepares every concert at the Philharmonic Society, painstakingly studying every number (many of which are performed for the first time after decades and centuries of oblivion, like old arias by Vivaldi, Monteverdi, Handel, Bortniansky or Berezovsky).
Zabiliasta is also an inspired interpreter of national and world romances for which she finds especially warm and tender colors on her rich vocal palette. Her remarkably diversified repertoire includes magic sunlit compositions by Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Lysenko, Stetsenko, Stepovy, also contemporary composers such as Shtoharenko, Bilash, and Dychko that are often performed during variety shows, never failing to warm the listeners’ hearts, inspiring nostalgic, elegiac, or elevated feeling. And the unmatched inspiration with which Zabiliasta performs Ukrainian folk songs! Well, these songs triggered her great operatic talent. Ivan Kozlovsky, one of the most outstanding singers of the 20th century, said: “Lidia Zabiliasta’s voice is pure gold.”
