She appeared on more than a dozen recordings, sang major operatic roles in Italy and Greece, toured with the Opera Company of Boston and performed with the Mark Morris Dance Company in Brussels, Belgium.
Having neatly bypassed the provinces, Ms. Borodina has spent the better part of the last decade purveying these calling-card roles to major operatic meccas, including the Met, Covent Garden, La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, the Bastille, the San Francisco Opera and the Salzburg Festival.
Prokofiev's first major operatic success, "The Gambler," realistically staged by Andrea Breth, is presented in December.
Writer explains a major operatic career usually lasts about 25 years, but one of the remarkable exceptions is Leonie Rysanek, who was recently in town to sign 2 performances of Sieglinde in the Metropolitan Opera's production of "Die Walkure --a role she first performed in 1951--and to appear at Carnegie Hall in a concert version of Janacek's "Jenufa".
Britten wrote each Canticle in the wake of a major operatic effort, as if to purge theatricality from his system.
Interestingly, my previous operatic role was the eponymous antihero of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin.
Lehmann received her early training in Berlin and made her first major operatic appearance in Hamburg as Freia in Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold in 1910.
She told me that the part she was singing in Verdi's Requiem is more demanding than any operatic role she sings, and she was nervous.
Given how much effort is needed to learn an operatic role, the resistance to undertaking new pieces, or reviving neglected ones, is understandable.
Plácido Domingo will create his 140th operatic role when he debuts next month in Verdi's "The Two Foscari" at Los Angeles Opera.
She landed a second operatic role as Mallika in Delibes' Lakmé, which was being performed by the London Covent Garden opera company.
