By Olga Fyodorova
In 1972 the Bolshoi’s artistic director Boris Pokrovsky decided to stage
Ruslan and Lyudmila by the 19th century Russian classic Mikhail Glinka.
All the main characters already down, he was looking hard for someone to
sing Lyudmila…
“Lyudmila has got to be a charming, agile and friendly young lady men are
lining up to marry, and with all these 100 kilo big mamas around here I
just can’t figure how they are going to do it standing still all through
the show!” Pokrovsky grumbled.
And what about inviting someone from the outside, say, Bela Rudenko from
the Kiev Opera?” ventured one of his assistants…
“A good idea!” Pokrovsky said. “I think she’s exactly what we are looking
for: good looking, slim, to say nothing about the voice… They call her
“a Ukrainian nightingale” and with good reason too. I wish she agreed,
being so busy singing and touring…”
The moment Pokrovsky’s invitation reached her in Kiev, however, Bela Rudenko
sidelined all her other dates and caught the first plane to Moscow to become
the best Lyudmila since the opera was unveiled in 1842…
Bela Rudenko spent her child years in Odessa on the Black Sea. Her
mother needed the warm sea climate to recuperate from the heavy wound she
suffered during the war, that’s why the family had moved south. She
never really thought about a singer’s career, just singing for pleasure,
like everyone else did in the family. One day, impressed by Bela’s
voice, their neighbor, a lead singer with the Odessa Opera, took the 16
year-old girl to the conservatory, right into the class of the famous teacher
Olga Blagovodova who was absolutely stunned by what she heard… Shortly
after, Bela was admitted…
Four years later she was already singing Gilda in Rigoletto on stage at
the city’s famous opera house.
The year 1957 was a very special one for Bela who graduated from the conservatory,
was invited to the venerable Kiev Opera and emerged victorious from a singer’s
competition held as part of the World Youth Festival in Moscow and all
this in just a few short months. Presiding over the jury in Moscow was
the famous Italian singer Tito Schipa who, forgetting about the rules,
applauded like mad and asked Bela to join him in an upcoming European tour.
Later that same year Bela Rudenko took part in a prestigious singers’ contest
in Toulouse, France.
“It was the first time a Soviet singer was performing there,” Bela Rudenko
recalled. “When they announced my name there was an audible buzz in the
audience as if someone told them I was an extraterrestrial or something…
The jury also tensed up just like I did, but my past stage experiences
came in very handy. I sang fine and when I was finished, they gave me a
long round of applause that was absolutely deafening and started congratulating
me right after the first round…”
Music critics in Germany, Poland, France, Japan, the United States, everywhere,
raved about the young Russian singer who was fast becoming a superstar…
At 27, Bela Rudenko was awarded the coveted State Prize and from then on
her voice filled the airwaves and her records were selling briskly all
across the nation.
At the very height of her well-deserved success, she was given a trial
run at the Bolshoi and, after her critically acclaimed performance in Ruslan
and Lyudmila, she gained full membership of the world-famous troupe where
she worked for a whole 20 years. The Bolshoi became her new love and she
was absolutely inimitable singing the parts of Rosina, Violetta, Gilda,
Lucia de Lammermour, Juliet and Iolanthe, the main character of Tchaikovsky’s
opera of the same name…
Iolanthe was the last thing she sang on stage and in 1988 she quit, still
in peak form and her voice strong and beautiful as ever. And still, feeling
the point of no return was near and hating to be anything but her very
best, she called it quits…
After leaving the Bolshoi, Bela Rudenko went on singing in concerts – something
she had always loved doing. Her chamber repertoire was amazingly
large and diverse and her programs well dramatized and impeccably crafted.
She was now taking delight in singing things she had never sung before…
One day, when she had already gotten used to her new life, the Bolshoi’s
director called her up and asked her to take charge of the theater’s opera
company. Fully aware of the dangers that new job held out for her,
she still agreed spending days and nights at the theater, oblivious of
her family, son and young grandson. She would attend each and every
rehearsal trying to learn as much as she possibly could about each singer.
She trained many talented young singers always in the midst of what was
going on…
That her new job was a dangerous one she learned pretty soon, though. Really,
if you assign some part to one singer, others inevitably get hurt and the
other way round. She tried to reconcile the differing interests only
to stir up another scandal, then another. Accused of being too partial
to some of her singers she invariably stood by her choice. “I like good
voices,” she would say, “I like real actors, hardworking, not loafers…”
They fired her during a foreign tour. After having flown first class with
the Bolshoi’s director and chief conductor, she was returning in the economy
compartment in the company of the choir singers and mimes….
The initial shock over, Bela Rudenko started teaching at the Moscow Conservatory
spawning many young talents. She likes to occasionally sing in class and
each time she does it she is whole again…
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