Independent interview with A. Hripin, Moscow-October 2004
OGONYOK, Nr.44(4871), November 2004
Das Opernglas - 18 Jahrgang - Januar 1998
Article - Vogue - N 568 December 1997
Amadeo
Classical Voice Review - Nabucco, Los Angeles Opera- Sept 8, 2002
CHI - Nr. 36/10 September 1998
LA NACION LINE - Lunes 23 de Mayo de 2005
María Guleghina: una voz para el Colón
La soprano ucraniana maravilló al público argentino en su único concierto en nuestro país, junto a la Orquesta Estable
Recital lírico de la soprano María Guleghina con la Orquesta Estable del Teatro Colón, dirigida por Jorge M. Carciofolo. Programa conformado por arias de "Don Carlo", "Otello", "Macbeth", "Aida" y "Un ballo in maschera" y oberturas de "La forza del destino", Luisa Miller", "I vespri siciliani" y preludio de "La traviata", de Giuseppe Verdi. Organizado por el Teatro Colón.
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spanish
Maria Guleghina : a Voice for Teatro Colón
Ukrainian soprano Maria Guleghina marveled the Argentine public in her only concert in this country, held with the Colón Theater's Resident Orchestra
It was a long time since the Teatro Colón was not inundated by a voice of the sumptuousness, volume and beauty as the one that Ukrainian Maria Guleghina let us listen to in her only contact so far with the local public. Moreover, there was the additional attraction of rediscovering the Resident Orchestra with its best sound quality and experience in the lyric repertory, conducted with skill by maestro Jorge Carciofolo.
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english
DAS OPERNGLAS -3 - 25. Jahrgang - März 2005 - DVDs Kritiken
Nabucco, Giuseppe Verdi (DG)
A. Laska
Mehr noch als mit dem Sänger der Titelpartie, steht und fällt jede Aufnahme von Verdis "Nabucco" mit der Interpretin der Abigaille. Nur wenige Sopranistinnen haben sich im Lauf ihrer Karriere an die Partie gewagt, noch weniger haben damit einen anhaltenden Erfolg gehabt. Umso höher ist auf diesem MET-Mitschnitt aus dem Verdi-Jahr 2001 die Leistung von Maria Guleghina zu bewerten. Rein stimmlich bringt sie geradezu ideale Voraussetzungen mit: einen dunkel gefärbten Sopran mit sicherer Tiefe und einer expansiven Höhe, die Fähigkeit zu dramatischer Attacke, aber ebenso ein hohes Maß an Beweglichkeit und Pianokultur. Ohne nennenswerte Anstrengung meistert sie die zahllosen Klippen der Partitur, ja sie kann es sich sogar leisten, die zweite Strophe ihrer Cabaletta noch mit zusätzlichen Verzierungen zu versehen und das Finale 1 mit einem schier umwerfenden hohen D zu krönen. Gestalterisch ist Guleghina als Rachefurie ebenso überzeugend wie in jenen Momenten, in denen Abigaille menschlichere Züge an den Tag legt.
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Das Opernglas - 3/2005
"..as big Verdi sopranos go today Guleghina is the tops. She's the reigning diva."
Andrew Porter, Times Literary Supplement.
Washington - "Aida" March 2003
"The Ukrainian soprano, Maria GULEGHINA, provided everything one wanted in the Aida character. She was beautiful, sympathetic, arresting and emotionally believable. Vocally her "Numi, pieta" was tenderly rendered and her "O patria mia" equally touching. Her voice is flexible, large and penetrating when needed, and lyrical as the drama required."
- DER NEUE MERKER- Mai 2003
Washington - "Aida" March 2003
"Maria Guleghina, with "Verdi in her Veins", wows Washington.
Ukrainian Soprano Maria Guleghina, who debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York 12 years ago, finally brought her artistry to the nation's capital, in the title role of the Washington Opera Company's innovative production of Verdi's "Aida".
In seven performances, between February 22 and March 11, the Odessa-born diva captivated sold-out audiences, much as she did the Egyptian commander Radames in the opera.
The Music critics of Washington's two dailies were smitten as well. "Thrilling" and "Compelling" were some of the accolades used to describe her performance, the re was the suggestion that despite her Ukrainian heritage, she had "Verdi in her Veins".
"Maria Guleghina made a vivid and exciting Aida", The Washington Post's top music critic, Tim Page, wrote about her Opening Night. "Her voice is large, dark, versatile and charged with emotional intensity; moreover, she has presence…. For all of her Ukrainian heritage, Guleghina has Verdi in her veins".
A few performances later, The Washington Times critic, T.L. Ponick, added some more praise to Ms. Guleghina's performance.
"… soprano Maria Guleghina was compelling. Conflicted, passionate, her Aida is forced to make a devil's bargain with father and country while somehow not betraying Radames. The discovery of her ruse brings the opera to its tragic denouement, and Miss Guleghina wrings every last bit of emotion out of the shifting scenery of Aida's life. Her low notes are distinctive in their clarity and force."…"
- THE UKRAINIAN WEEKLY - March 16, 2003
London - Covent Garden, - Attila - February 2002
"The magnificent Russian soprano Maria Guleghina sings the role of Odabella, the avenging Italian Heroine…"
- The Lady - 12 to 18 February 2002
Arena di Verona - Nabucco - July 1996
"Maria Guleghina, grenzt an ein Wunder. Ihre Stimme erstreckt sich mühelos in die höchsten Register, und selbst Zweioktavensprünge scheinen für sie kein Problem zu sein. Auch im Fortissimo überaus kultiviert, glasklar, aber wenn nötig mit viel Aplomb: Eine außergewöhnliche Leistung, die das Publikum förmlich elektrisierte."
- DAS OPERNGLAS - October 1996
"HER SOPRANO IS THE REAL THING"
"SOPRANO'S RAPTUROUS VOICE CAPTURES ESENCE OF VERDI"
"HER SINGING WAS SPECTACULAR.."
- THE HERALD - March 6, 2002
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New York -Aida -MET - Friday October 2, 1998
"Most strikingly, and very usefully in this opera, Ms. Guleghina can rise from her gentle kind of delivery to be heard over a stage full of chorus and principals, and can do so smoothly, with no apparent exertion and no loss of tone, only a change from silver to gold.
The effect is of a zoom into a close up in a crowd scene. This bright, brave tone draws the audience's attention to Aida at times when nobody else onstage knows what is gouing on. Ms. Guleghina's vivid singing does not exert command but rather sympathy. Her prayer is that an individual's feelings should be felt to matter above the noise of politics and war, and it is a prayer that is answered."
- The New York Times - Friday, October 2, 1998 -
01/10/2003 - Tosca, Houston Grand Opera
…The cast handles the intricacies of the story and the music quite well - and there hardly seems a better choice for the title role than Maria Guleghina, world-renowned Russian soprano. She seems to tap directly into the inner emotions of the ole, moving from joy to jealousy to despair to betrayal with ease. Guleghina's clear soprano carries the often-demanding musical score well. She gracefully performs octave jumps and georgeous arias…
(The Galbeston County Advertiser, October, 29, 2003)
…Alternating with "Caesar" is a rather pedestrian version of Puccini's Tosca, enlivened mainly by the appearance of Super-Tosca Maria Guleghina. This hugely powerful soprano gave the role of the blackmailed singer sufficient heft, controlled variation and occasional sweetness…
(American Stateman, November, 6, 2003)
…But Houston Grand Opera's current production manages to make this most battle-scarred of operas fresh and with thoroughly traditional sets and costumes. Both dramatically and musically, it's lull of pleasant and subtle surprises. For all the sopranos who flail and screech their way through the title role, Maria Guleghina all hut owns it. Too many others make the diva such a monster of self-absorbed jealousy that you can't imagine why any man would go near her. Ms. Guleghina's Tosca is high-strung to be sure, and jealous, but underneath she's a decent human being. She has her playful and vulnerable sides, too. And in her second-act standoff with Scarpia, you can only admire how she channels her horror into a steely cool. She even makes her slow-as-molasses "Vissi d'arte" persuasive as a kind out-of-body experience. And there's the voice, one o the biggest on any singe. But melting the paint off the walls by boiling rather than scorching - is only one of the things she does with it. She uses its whole enormous range of volume and color, from whitish girlishness when flirting to that hurling volcano of sound in full terror…
(DallasNews.com, November, 3, 2003)
Place de la Bastille, 6PM, January 26th 1999!
Published in Carbon 14, issue number 15, Spring 1999
As the Lady, Odessa-born Maria Guleghina confirmed the impression I got in Roma six months earlier: to wit, a tremendous dramatic presence with nearly limitless vocal means.
Powerful and lush, her voice traveled from the deepest doom-laden lower registers through a smooth and even middle, all the way to stratospheric high notes, all without a hint of strain or metallic traces... Along with beautiful " piani ", " mezza voce " and " smorzandi ", all in moments of abandon alternating with the most extreme darkness, and madness deep enough to sleepwalk... As a matter of fact, in the sleepwalking scene of act IV, her cry of distress and bale is so soft, so smooth, so ravishingly spun, the high note such an angelic whisper, that you forget for an instant that this is Lady Macbeth, serpent and murderess, trailing gore, drenched in blood and perfidy. Great art, indeed ! !
Early Verdi Gets Star
TreatmentBy Truman C. WangSunday, Sept 8, 2002
NABUCCO<
Performance of Sunday, September 8, 2002 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
All photos by ROBERT MILLARD, courtesy of Los Angeles Opera
LOS ANGELES, CALIF - If standing ovations in our opera houses, like tips in restaurants, seem more obligatory than meritorious these days, it's often attributed to less discerning audiences. But, last night, when the cheering audience jumped to its feet at the end of Nabucco, it wasn't to cheer the eponymous hero or Moshinsky's production (both were snoozers), but rather the truly superb Abigaille of soprano Maria Guleghina. The murderously high tessitura of Abigaille holds no terror for soprano Maria Guleghina, who has sung this role all over the world and, I suspect, is vocally more accomplished than even Giuseppina Strepponi (Verdi's soon-to-be mistress) from the original cast. Ms. Guleghina's powerful voice projects like a razor-sharp laser beam with a warm glow in the center. It is a voice capable of the most blood-curdling cries as well as the softest, most poignant tones. (Abigaille's final aria "Su me, morente" brought tears to these eyes). Ms. Guleghina belongs to that rare breed of singers nowadays - the true Verdi soprano.
February 4, 2001
Maria Guleghina: A Soprano Who Stands Time's Test
By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH
OR sheer sensationalism, maybe only opera can compare with childhood. The Ukrainian soprano Maria Guleghina, the reigning Tosca of the last decade, tells a story from her sixth year that would have raised a shudder in Puccini himself, that master torturer of heroines.
In her native Odessa, Ms. Guleghina (properly pronounced goo-LEG-ee-nuh, though the accent is usually shifted to the third syllable, even by her) caught sight of a street tough nearly three times her age and who knows how many times her size mauling a sparrow. She flew at him in outrage, quitting the field only after sustaining a broken arm with the bone sticking clear through the skin. Back in her room, she quietly bound the wound with a handkerchief and drifted to sleep. Not until the next morning, when her mother discovered the blood-soaked sheets, did she receive medical attention.
"My father didn't want me to fight," Ms. Guleghina remembers. "But he always said: `If you're going to fight, you have to win or be brave enough to lose. You can't come home and cry.' "
The spitfire who took these lessons so much to heart now specializes in heroines equally intrepid of spirit, some of them markedly sinister. In a concert performance of Verdi's "Macbeth" by the Collegiate Chorale on Feb. 12 at Carnegie Hall, she portrays the Lady. In March, she returns to the Metropolitan Opera as the warlike Abigaille in the same composer's "Nabucco." Her manager, Bruce Zemsky of Columbia Artists Management, actually likens his client to a "dinosaur," an epithet he hastens to explain: "Singing the two most terrifying Verdi roles in the same season will hopefully be a confirmation to all that she is one of the few living remnants of a dying species."
Meanwhile, this afternoon, Ms. Guleghina makes her American solo recital debut in Lincoln Center's Great Performers series at Alice Tully Hall, in a program imaginatively juxtaposing Russian romances of Mikhail Glinka with songs of the Italian bel canto composers Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini: a reminder (if such were needed) that a diva's staying power rests not just on temperament but also on solid technique, a point most certainly not lost on Ms. Guleghina herself, who is an outspoken critic of flash-in-the- pan careers fueled by premature recording contracts.
"A real voice, a voice that will last for a career of 30 or even 40 years, is not something that is ready in a day," the 41- year-old soprano says. "To build a great violin, you must first choose the wood. Then you must dry the wood. You must season it. All this before you cut it and make the instrument. Then you must lacquer it. You have to wait."
The corresponding phases for building a voice? "Scales, exercises, for years," Ms. Guleghina says. "No songs. No arias. When people say a 12-year-old is a singer, it's like saying that someone who takes pictures from an airplane is a pilot. It's impossible. A singer who lasts a long time has to have good schooling."
Hers has already stood her in good stead for 14 consecutive seasons at La Scala in Milan, where the turnover of leading ladies is frightening. In the 1986-87 season, still in her early 20's, she made her international debut there as Amelia in Verdi's "Ballo in Maschera," with an all-star cast including Luciano Pavarotti, Leo Nucci and Fiorenza Cossoto. To save rubles, the official Soviet booking agency, Goskoncert, released her barely in time for the premiere, and it was not until later that it registered with her that she had broken into the big time. "Back home in Minsk," she says, "I took out the poster from Italy and was in shock."
By now Ms. Guleghina had proved blazing spirit, nerves of steel, an iron-clad technique. Many a lucrative career has been built on less, but something was still missing. Working with the director Piero Faggioni on Tosca, she discovered what it was. Bringing a character alive, he explained to her, meant more than striking the right poses and hitting her marks. "Where were you five minutes before your entrance?" he asked her, requiring her to imagine not just moments in an action but a whole way of being.
Here is another lesson Ms. Guleghina has taken to heart. Last year in Seville, her debut in the all-encompassing role of Norma, in Bellini's bel canto tragedy of that name, elicited notices from the Spanish press that might have been dictated by the diva's mother. "Guleghina's powerful assumption of the tormented Druid priestess was a lesson in dramatic conviction and vocal and musical mastery," said the critic of El Mundo. A counterpart at El País wrote: "She has music and drama in her veins, which she transmits with great conviction." And these were the reviewers who kept their heads.
"I didn't expect the reaction," the soprano says. "Before we opened, all the papers were running articles about Callas, about Sutherland. Those were the great Normas, they said. So I thought: `What do I do? Go to the cemetery?' I had always wanted to sing Norma, but I'm demanding, and I didn't feel ready. It's not just about voice. It's not just emotion. It's everything wrapped up together." Many have shared the sentiment. Lover, mother, a woman scorned, an avenger, who in the end chooses a noble death for love: Norma combines the great female archetypes in one.
Like any diva worthy of the name, Ms. Guleghina has her quirks. Probably the most striking are her reminders, at least once an evening, that if she chose, she could triumph on decibels alone. In the beginning of her international career, before she gave up the Russian repertory to concentrate exclusively on the Italians, she used to blow audiences at Tchaikovsky's "Queen of Spades" to kingdom come with a few well-placed gale-force blasts. As Cilea's Maddalena de Coigny, in "Andrea Chénier," and in the title roles of Puccini's "Manon Lescaut" and Verdi's "Aida," she has hurled strategic thunderbolts as well.
If the excitement of such moments eclipses her subtler effects, that is not her intention. One summer night at the arena in Verona, Italy, she was devastated when rain washed out the last act of "Nabucco," and with it, one last scene of Abigaille's. "The audience has seen her evil side and heard fireworks," she said backstage. "But they have not seen her fear, her remorse, her death." Ms. Guleghina needed to complete the arc.
Lady Macbeth, too, takes the artist toward a haunted destination. "The character is like a serpent," Ms. Guleghina says. "She watches, then she strikes. She watches, then she strikes." She carries this idea through to the hushed, eerie sleepwalking scene, cultivating a dark, sibilant sound. "Piano," she says, "is a feeling as well as a dynamic."
Since her Scala debut, Ms. Guleghina has come a long way. Back in Minsk, as members of the opera house, she and her husband, Mark Guleghin, a baritone, would put a little extra food on their table by digging potatoes in the country on their days off. Now they make their home in Luxembourg and travel the world with their year-old Ruslan, the baby they long wished for.
"But what has changed?" Ms. Guleghina muses. "Tell me. Those were our happiest times. We went to Minsk to sing. Today, I study every day like a student. I'm just a normal person. Every day when you go on stage, it's a test. Do you know what you need to know? Can you do it? If I've been singing in the best houses around the world for 14 years, I must be doing it right."
Metropolitan Opera, Sly
S.D., Ópera Actual (Spain), July/August 2002
Soprano Maria Guleghina was more than a match for Sly with a powerful characterization of Dolly. Dolly was the Count of Westmoreland's mistress. She had all the trappings of wealth but her heart was empty. Ms. Guleghina's voice was clear and powerful and her phrasing expressive.
Metropolitan Opera, Sly
John W. Freeman, Opera News, July 2002
He had a worthy partner in Maria Guleghina, whose strong, penetrating timbre, albeit with patches of reckless vocalism, conveyed passion and conviction.
Placido tackles 119th operatic role
Frederick M. Winship, UPI, April 19, 2002
Fortunately, he has the support of an extremely strong cast. Maria Guleghina, the Russian-born soprano who has become a favorite leading lady at the Met, gives a powerful vocal and dramatic performance as Dolly, a kept woman with a heart of gold.
A Sad Tale, a Footnote, Rarely Seen
Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, April 3, 2002
The soprano Maria Guleghina brings her powerful voice and presence to the role of Dolly.
BERLINER MORGENPOST
Die piekfeinen Stimmexplosionen der Sopranistin Maria Guleghina
An Originalität ließ es der Liederabend von Maria Guleghina in der Deutschen Oper nicht fehlen. Die berühmte ukrainische Sopranistin, seit langem eine der herausforderndsten Stimmen im hochdramatischen Opernfach, schlich sich geradezu durch einen Wald von Glinka-Liedern, mit denen nicht viel Stimm-Staat zu machen ist, die Umwege gewissenhaft kostend, an ihre eigentliche Domäne heran: die der Stimmexplosionen. Aber auch die werden in den Liedern von Bellini, Donizetti und Rossini nur wie mit dem Tropfenzähler gespendet.
Natürlich hat auch Glinka in Italien für den russischen Salon und seine Sehnsüchte nach Melancholie und venezianischem Ruderschlag Inspiration getankt. Überdies war er als Komponist ein ausgesprochener Edelmann. Viel Frische ist nicht um ihn, stattdessen erlesener Geschmack, wie ihn auch Frau Guleghina besitzt. Und diesen Geschmack kostete Frau Guleghina mit feinem Empfinden aus, bald melancholisch vernebelt, bald aufgeheitert. Salon-Gefühle, piekfein, wenn auch nicht sehr abwechslungsreich. Elfmal Glinka gab's bis zur Pause, jedes Lied mit Beifall bedankt. Das muss selbst die Diva aus der Stimmung reißen.
Guleghina sang dagegen an. Sie kehrte ausgiebig heim nach Venedig. Wieder wechselte sie von der Melancholie zur Heiterkeit und zurück, und als sie bei den Regatten Rossinis angelangt war - als etwas schlagarmer Gondoliere wirkte Ivary Ilya am Klavier - wies sie auch nach, was für ein großes Bühnentalent ihr gegeben ist. Man möchte sie gern in angemessenen Rollen wieder hören. Die der Liedsängerin gibt nichts als Kostproben der ihr eingeborenen Vorzüglichkeit.
Gtl