1. The Kreutzer Sonata
2. The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice
3. Endgame
4. Annie Get Your Gun
5. Bedroom Farce

Curtain up at Covent Garden

 Add your view

 

Moving centre stage: Marina Poplavskaya will sing Elisabetta in Verdi's Don Carlo

Look here too

• Hytner's back in an epic season at Covent Garden
• Great deals on opera tickets

Today the Royal Opera House will name an unknown Russian soprano as one of the stars of its new season. As Elisabetta in Verdi's Don Carlo, Marina Poplavskaya, 29, will sing a role originally earmarked for Angela Gheorghiu, who withdrew on the grounds that it did not suit her voice. In his return to Covent Garden after 20 years, Nicholas Hytner will direct, with Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón in the title role. This is opera at its most glittering.

Is she ready for the challenge? "I am shaking like a jelly-fish," Poplavskaya says, with only a glimmer of a smile, her gaze intense. "I am not insecure. I know my possibilities. I will do my best to be at the right level. We shall see." Until two years ago Poplavskaya was singing lead roles in Russia. "But colleagues advised me to get out, to taste wider experiences, culturally, professionally. London was the obvious place. You are respected for your individuality."

So in between Moscow performances, she auditioned for the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artist's Programme, hijacking a motorbike courier to get her back to the airport in time. "Antonio [Pappano] was saying, now just sing this, and try that. And I was telling him, 'The bike is waiting, I have to go back to be on stage in Moscow.' Then I jumped on the pillion in my concert dress with a helmet on and sped off." Tall, slim, with a pony tail nearly down to her knees, she caused quite a stir, and the episode has become part of Floral Street legend.

All ROH Young Artists sing on the Covent Garden stage, but few make such an instant transition to major roles. Poplavskaya took the cameo part of Third Norn in Wagner's Gotterdammerung last year. For Pappano, this was evidence enough: she was ready for bigger things. She shone in a concert performance of Halévy's La Juive, and will perform Donna Anna in Don Giovanni in June, as well as Tatiana in Eugene Onegin next season.

Born in Moscow, Poplavskaya sang in the Bolshoi children's chorus from the age of eight and entered the city's Ippolitov-Ivanov Music Academy when she was 14. She describes her upbringing as poor: "I was brought up mainly by my grandmother. She worked all her life in a car factory. Now? She gets three dollars a month pension. For a lifetime's work."

She recalls, with feeling, how her grandmother saved and conspired through the Soviet years to buy books, always a scarcity. "You had to be in with the bookseller so you could be sure to get your copy, since books were so scarce. So at the age of eight I would sit reading Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and all the Russian greats because they were there on the wall in front of me. That to me seems amazing now."

Both her parents are scientists. She speaks about them, and the economic conditions in Russia today, with painful hesitation. "My father? I prefer not to speak about him. My mother is a chemist with five specialist diplomas. But she works as a taxi driver because she can earn more. She's very honest. She can't steal anything. She would rather work for her money."

I mention the new dynasty of Russian billionaires, now flocking to London. Her expression is one of exasperation. "I know a few. I don't want to comment. We know what happens [to people who speak out]. But you know that in Moscow there are young people with so much money that they are already booking themselves great marble tombs costing a fortune in the city's cemeteries."

Poplavskaya's family, who held their Russian Orthodox faith throughout the Soviet years keeping an icon hidden in a wardrobe, had music in their blood, but no training.

"My mother was always singing, wonderful folk songs and chants. That's what Russians do." She has no immediate plans to return to Moscow. Her life now is divided between London and America. Last year she married the bass-baritone Robert Hale, 40 years her senior, instantly acquiring three stepsons older than her, and seven grandchildren.

"The soul is never old. We manage. And I would like children of my own, however that fits into my career." She met Hale on stage three years ago, when he was singing The Flying Dutchman and she had stepped in to cover the challenging role of Senta.

"I went on in Act Two and sang the lines about the doomed Dutchman needing a faithful wife. Robert and I had never even met. He looked at me, and embraced me so hard he was crushing my bones. It was love at first sight."

Since her voice remains unfamiliar to most of us I ask her, rather unfairly, to describe its characteristics. "Well, I would like to say: the rising sun on a fine morning with blue sky and birds, yet with thoughts of the dark night ahead ever present. Perhaps, though: soft, but with metal, able to fly through the orchestra, for which I am fortunate."

Most of her spare time in London is spent at concerts. "But I also like dancing." Clubbing? "No way. I mean Baroque dancing, which we do here as part of our training. I would find the disco so loud. I live over a pub in Soho and the row can be awful." She puts her hands over her ears. "I detest noise, but I love harmony."

 

What's on today   What's on tomorrow

Receive our newsletter