Vladimir Ognovenko, long associated with Varlaam in ‘Boris Godunov,’ remains fascinated with Mussorgsky’s interpretation
The pressroom of the Metropolitan Opera almost shivers as bass Vladimir Ognovenko demonstrates different tones, resonances and textual responses to augment interview points he wants to make. In 2001, Ognovenko was called “Russia’s finest bass” by the late John Ardoin in his book Valery Gergiev and the Kirov. Ognovenko is at the Met this month to sing the role of Varlaam, a roguish monk and professional go-along-to-get-along (with a consuming interest in alcohol), in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.
Ognovenko & Antonenko in Boris Godunov / Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
Today, of course, it’s a dramatically different world for Russian opera singers than the late-Soviet period in which Ognovenko came of age. In 1995, he was Glinka’s Ruslan to Anna Netrebko’s Lyudmilla when she made her U.S. debut at the San Francisco Opera. A year earlier, he had begun singing with the Met. But during the Soviet epoch, only a handful of singers could make guest appearances with the West’s major opera companies. Exchanges were limited and regimented. When Ognovenko first came to the West, he still hadn’t heard many of our noted singers, whose recordings were hard to come by in the USSR. In addition, “if the KGB caught you listening to a foreign recording, you could be put on a black list,” he recalls.
He trained at the State Conservatory in then-Sverdlovsk, (formerly and again presently Ekaterinburg) in central Russia, a large city noted for its theatrical institutions. He then spent fifteen years in the city’s opera house developing the characterizations that would take him to Russia’s capital stages. The foundation of his sound owes something to the recordings of Fyodor Chaliapin, the towering bass who enjoyed a great international career in the early 20th century. “I don’t copy him because it’s impossible. But I tried to learn his principles and use them.” Above all, he was attracted to Chaliapin’s array of vocal colors. “Chaliapin never sang with the same voice about love, about hatred,” Ognovenko explains. “He always had different overtones according to the text, the emotion.” In 1984, Ognovenko joined the Maly, the second most important theater of opera and ballet in then-Leningrad (currently St. Petersburg). In 1989, he moved across town to the Mariinsky (then the Kirov), the city’s flagship house. Throughout the 1990s, he sang both with it and with the equally hallowed Bolshoi in Moscow.
At school he learned Italian and some German, but all performance repertories were translated into Russian during the Soviet era, a custom that has been entirely revised since Perestroika. Relearning in Italian the role of Rossini’s blustery rapscallion Don Basilio in Il Barbieri di Siviglia wasn’t difficult, according to Ognovenko, but it was liberating. “The music of the language is connected with the music itself; they’re inseparable. When you sing in its natural language it is totally different and it flows.”
Ognovenko has sung Varlaam at almost every Met Boris since 1997. It’s one of any number of supporting roles in which he’s made an indelible impression here. He has also sung some of the most important bass roles in the Russian repertory with the Mariinsky during its guest seasons at the Met over the last two decades. But he’s sung those Russian touchstones only rarely with the Met company itself, and that’s something he regrets. Nevertheless, the Met is home for him. According to Ognovenko, music director James Levine “has created a company where everybody is treated as a star. It doesn’t matter what kind of role you sing; they pay attention to you here.”
His repertory embraces some of the unholy comic fools that are everywhere in the Russian operatic canon. He can weave and shamble with the best of them but, physical resources included, it all comes back to the notes on the page. “When I start studying a new role, I have so many questions going through the score: Why is there a pause here? Why does he change keys? And when I think about it, when I ‘get it,’ I understand the role, what to do physically, mentally, what it is all about.”
Ognovenko’s voice remains in pristine condition after a long career. Last season he was the barber Ivan Yakovlevich in Shostakovich’s The Nose when it received its Met premiere. Now that the opera is enjoying something of a resurgent vogue, he’ll do it later this year in France, in both Aix-en-Provence and Lyons. Last month in Russia he exchanged Varlaam for the entirely different role of Boris himself at the Chaliapin Festival in Kazan. In May he will return to the Mariinsky after a long absence to sing Boris during the theater’s White Nights Festival. He has long been acclaimed for the role, and he continues to be fascinated by the way that Mussorgsky added additional psychological complexity to Pushkin’s play. He heightened Boris’ presumption of his own innocence, “saying in his music that Boris is not a killer.” As Ognovenko sees it, Boris might have simply dropped the right word, complaining that the young Tsarevich stood in the way of Russia’s progress, and let the rest fall into place. Throughout the opera, then, he is plagued with a baffling and tormenting guilt, and “when you play a person in doubt, it is very interesting.”
Ognovenko sings Varlaam on March 17 in the Met’s final Boris Godunov this season.
