By Olga Fyodorova
On a sultry summer day in 1945 a visibly distraught young man was sitting
on the steps of a music college in the Ural Mountains city of Sverdlovsk.
An elderly woman walked out and, seeing the young man, said:
“Waiting for someone?”
“No, I just don’t know what to do, where to go… You know, when I
was on my way here I wasn’t sure if I was going to enter your art school
or the music one… I wanted to enter both. Well, when I finally arrived
they told me they had taken in all entrance papers they needed, meaning
that I will now have to get back to my village…”
“And what instrument do you play?”
“I don’t play anything. I just want to be a singer…”
“How old are you?”
“Going on 18…”
“Are you a tenor, bass or baritone?”
“I don’t know, maybe I’m a bass…”
“Okay, let’s go, let me hear you out…”
After that improvised audition, the young man who, as you might have
already guessed, was Alexander Vedernikov, was allowed to stand the exams
and, passing them with a snap, was immediately sent to join the second
year students.
Before that, Alexander had never seriously dabbled in music or painting.
Born into a large family of poor land tillers living in a backwater Russian
village, Alexander learned the hard job of a peasant early on. He was singing
all the time, his high-pitched crystal-clean voice giving credit to his
native village of Mokino, famous far and wide for its good voices…
“My fellow villagers were singers all,” Alexander recalled. “The
people around me tilled land and sang, learning songs from each other and
writing new ones. The Russian songs became part of my life, just
like the forests, sunsets, sunrises, the fragrant grass and the Vyatka
River... It went right down into my soul to stay there forever as the image
of my Motherland and its people…”
After finishing his seventh grade at school, Alexander Vedernikov
headed to the nearby city where he did some metalworking and painted still
lives and portraits. “Gee! You’re a great painter!” his friends gasped
in admiration. “Go study and you will make it real big…”
Others held their breath and went: “Go to a music school and you
will sing operas, like Chaliapin did…” That’s why Alexander was so bitterly
split between going to a music school or taking up painting. It eventually
came down to a chance choice however. Vedernikov became a singer but he
never gave up painting lining the walls of his apartment with the portraits
of his friends, still lives and Russian landscapes.
Russian landscapes were also a big part of Vedernikov’s music. He
always went for songs with character and go and his chamber music repertoire
was absolutely inimitable…
The diversity of his chamber program really boggles the mind featuring
Russian music, European songs and romantically tinged miniatures. Already
a student of the Moscow Conservatory’s singers’ department he won international
acclaim winning the prestigious Schumann competition in Berlin.
Dreaming, just like any other budding singer, about an operatic career,
Alexander Vedernikov signed up with Leningrad’s Kirov Theater (now Mariinsky)
right after graduating from the Conservatory in 1955. After a two-year
stint there he was invited to the more prestigious Bolshoi Theater company
in Moscow where he worked for nearly forty years…
There is hardly a bass part around not sung by Alexander Vedernikov
who perfectly knew his way around in German and Italian operas. He even
sang King Philip in Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlos many times on stage of
Milan’s venerable La Scala Opera. As far as his personal preferences go,
he always went for Russian music though…
His biggest forte, however, were heroic Russian characters, such
as Ivan Susanin in Mikhail Glinka’s opera of the same name, and he was
equally convincing with funny and exotic characters, including the bizarre-looking
and sounding Khan Konchak in Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor opera…
Alexander Vedernikov sang in many modern operas too, among them the War
and Peace written by Sergei Prokofyev. He also won kudos singing the part
of Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, the great 19th century Russian commander
who turned the tide of the 1812 war with Napoleon. Forced to take
hard, sometimes even tragic, decisions, such as the controversial order
to cede Moscow to the enemy, Kutuzov knew all along that it was a temporary
fallback meant to save the army that eventually kicked the Napoleonic hordes
out of Russia…
Alexander Vedernikov was greatly influenced by the composer Georgy Sviridov
whose many compositions he perfectly unveiled, among them the Oratorio
of Passion based on Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem. The bass lead voice was
meant to belong to the poet himself who once welcomed the socialist revolution
with romantic enthusiasm. Vedernikov’s stirring performance of the Left
March invariably sent the audience up on their feet and applauding like
mad…
Alexander Vedernikov sang the Oratorio of Passion almost everywhere in
Russia and also in Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the UK…
Still very fit and agile at 74, Alexander Vedernikov has now taken the
back seat to a younger generation of singers devoting more time to painting.
In the summer he visits his native village picking mushrooms, drying them,
pickling, marinating and giving out to his many Moscow friends in the fall…
In wintertime he often goes out to concerts in the Conservatory never missing
a chance to see the work of his son, a well-known symphony conductor. Sometimes,
in the company of his wife, an excellent pianist, he listens to his old
records and wishes he could do it all over again because he says, “ when
you get older, you get a different understanding of what music is all about.
We are so driven when we are young and so wise when we get older… Just
how best to combine the two – that is the question…”
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