Opera's Siberian Express

By Michael Walsh

Opera singers often hail from unlikely places. Leontyne Price emerged from tiny Laurel, Mississippi; tenor Jon Vickers from Prince Albert on the plains of Saskatchewan. But it is hard to recall a leading man or lady from a place more remote and exotic than central Siberia. And yet the singer who seems destined to be the next big star of the lyric stage is the pride of Krasnoyarsk: a strapping, darkly handsome baritone named Dmitri Hvorostovsky.

The opera world has been buzzing about Hvorostovsky (give the H a slight rasp and add vor-stov-ski) ever since his triumph at the 1989 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition. The following year a don't-miss-it debut recital in Alice Tully Hall in New York City confirmed the advance word: this was a galvanic new personality and a voice of uncommon refinement, flexibility and musical intelligence.

Now, making his American opera debut as Germont in La Traviata with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Hvorostovsky, 31, has proved he can put across a performance with interpretive sympathy and burnished vocal splendor. His baritone is lighter than most Slavic male voices, more Latin in color and inflection; if the top of his register needs to open a bit more, the rest of the voice is rich and resonant.

"I was nervous, yes," he admits of his Chicago outing. "You try to think of it as just another performance, but it was somehow special. Even so, that was not the most memorable performance I have ever given." Oh? "I was giving a recital in a bread factory, a great big place in Siberia. The piano was terrible. I had to get undressed behind the door. Then I went out and sang Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff songs. And you know what? When I looked up I could see that everybody was crying. Nothing could ever top that."

Except, perhaps, the career that lies ahead. Opera managers have already snapped up the brown-eyed idol for a string of major debuts: the dashing title role in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at Covent Garden in London this month, Riccardo in Bellini's I Puritani at the Vienna State Opera next year, Prince Yeletsky in Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1995. This month Philips is issuing a new Traviata with Hvorostovsky as Germont.

Hvorostovsky is not only ready for stardom, he can scarcely remember a time when he wasn't preparing for it. His mother was a doctor, his father a chemical engineer and amateur singer and pianist who loved Bach, Chopin and Liszt. Young Dima's formal training began at age seven and concluded at the local conservatory, where he studied piano and conducting as well as voice. Music, however, had to compete for his affections with soccer, boxing and, later, girls. He frankly admits that for much of his young life, thoughts of women and music have occupied most of his waking hours. Married in 1987, he lives today in Moscow with his ballerina wife, Svetlana, and her 11-year-old daughter by a previous marriage.

But it was one woman in particular who deeply influenced him: his teacher Ekaterina Yofel. She convinced him that he was a natural high baritone, not a tenor; she also taught him to free his imagination while he was singing, "to make the voice open up like a bouquet of flowers." Accordingly, he blossomed in his first contest. He went on to conquer the International Singing Competition of Toulouse in France in 1988 and capped it with his victory at Cardiff the next year. "I won every contest I entered," he says, without boasting. Soon, in Hvorostovsky's realm, there may be no contest at all.

With reporting by Daniel S.Levy/New York