ÿþ<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>News</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1251" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../styles/styles.css" /> <style type="text/css"> .style1 { border-style: solid; border-width: 0; margin-top: 23px; margin-bottom: 23px; } </style> </head> <body style="background-color: #600000"> <div id="Table_01" style="left: 0px; top: 0px; height: 754px"> <div id="image-top"> </div> <div id="heading"> <a href="introduction.html"> <img alt="Nicola Ghiuselev  Workshop "Opera mastery"" longdesc=" Nicola Ghiuselev  Workshop "Opera mastery", New Bulgarian University" src="../images/nicola-ghiuselev-en.gif" class="style1" width="416" height="82" /></a></div> <div id="image-middle"> </div> <div id="corner"> </div> <div id="spacer-corner" style="left: 241px; top: 110px"> </div> <div id="main" style="left: 205px; top: 137px; height: 620px"> <div id="cont_main"> <h1>Nicola Ghiuselev  The Bass</h1> <p>Was Orpheus, the mythical singer of Thrace, the first Bulgarian singer? Sometimes we are tempted to believe it, especially when artists coming from this country, with their characteristic class and inimitability, succeed to move and excite us, thus crossing the outlines of geographical borders. Such cases are anything but rare: with the exception of several sopranos mostly related to the Italian repertoire, this is often true of the basses register, of artists who have lent their remarkably expressive voices in service of extraordinary personalities. Today we celebrate the 70th anniversary  and 45 years of successful career  of Nicola Ghiuselev who unquestionably belongs with this very special  race . An extraordinary and versatile personality, Ghuiselev was born a painter of steady hand for drawing and fantasy for colour. This is how he remembers his own discovery of music: he was a young man at that time, and the radio was playing Boris s monologue,  a melody that shook me. I was painting at that moment, so I stopped right there and stood listening, fascinated with the beauty of this music /& / That afternoon changed my life. And so, music came into his life. At first, it was the experience gained in a students choir & although it was not a usual thing for candidates for the choir to sing the aria of Susanin at the audition, and in such an astonishing way& His professor of vocal art was Hristo Brambarov, of whom Nicola kept an affectionate and grateful memory for what he learned both in professional and human terms. His voice developed decisively in the register and colour of bass, though with amazing ease and brilliance of high pitch. His repertoire began to form of small parts but from a wide variety of operas: Russian, German, Italian, French, as well as written by modern Bulgarian composers. This variety fascinated the young artist, and he kept seeking to decipher one personage or another. For all his parts, Ghiuselev carefully studied, designed and realized his own makeup  a task even more interesting when the respective character had vivid physical features like the old blind King Archibaldo in L Amore dei Tre Re. After the Viking in Sadko, Timur and Pimen, at the final stage of a 1963 competition, while singing  Ella giammai m'amò , he made it clear that Philip would become one of his great parts. Another great role, for that matter, could be the bass par excellence of the Russian repertoire: Boris Godunov. Ghiuselev, however, rendered a remarkable interpretation of the role of Mussorgsky s tormented tsar before even having turned 30. In 1965, his international career began, from Italy to Japan, to spread out later on to the most prestigious opera theatres in the world - the Staatsoper of Viena, Lyric of Chicago, and many others. All throughout, he won important awards, received recognition for his talent, and gained experience in teaching. My acquaintance with Ghiuselev started with his Mephistopheles in Arena di Verona: his Devil - different, as he is, from Gounod s Mephistopheles, which we afterwards watched on video for comparison  is elegant and irresistible, ironic with due measure. One is left with the feeling that he lacks something. And this lack is not for the singer but for the character: Ghiuselev is capable of something entirely different, of a profound and powerful immersion into the character s mind. I had the chance to appreciate this typical feature of his in 1982, when we were working together on the production of Ernani in San Carlo of Naples. Ghiuselev s Silva, with his incredible nobility and not so old as to be deprived of fascination, becomes, with his very first appearance on stage, one of the leading characters  even before he has uttered  Che mai vegg'io? , one understands that something is going on there. And this will happen over and over again, in moments of hurt humaneness or hardly suppressed rage. Silva s part will always have its specific outline, always solitary and contrasting with the parts of the other singers. His appearance in the closing scene will be especially impressive, when the aim of staging is to effect a murky atmosphere, a ghost dance of a kind. Speaking of Tito Gobbi s directing, I can say that in fact I was present at the meeting of two outstanding personalities, very similar in a way. In his book The Voice That Draws, Ghiuselev writes:  There is no clear boundary between the different aspects of art. /& / The most important thing is to interpret the character you have chosen, to live with it. As for me, I owe a lot to  drawing in the course of the making of the characters on stage: I look closely at my body, my arms and hands, my posture, my voice  all the elements of acting  with the eyes of a painter. As though I m drawing them right there! That was also how Tito Gobbi worked  one can hardly believe that the two of them never knew each other before, and never met after. Nevertheless, discussing the chance of directing performances himself, Ghiuselev notes:  I would have done it Tito Gobbi s way, which involves preparatory work with the actors: I would have made them immerse in the context to find out what exactly is specific of their characters. I do not particularly approve of the way in which most directors work, making a show for the audience without attempting to explore the depths of the opera. It is in these  depths of the opera where the secret of an emotion or at least the starting point of its interpretation resides. As for the rest of the secret, in fact it is beyond explanation. I have also seen other extraordinary performances of Ghiuselev: his Philip of 1986 in Opera di Roma, a remake of Visconti s staging, and one more proof  if at all needed  that if stage directing allows for a production to be restored within its overall framework, to create or re-create a performance in the full sense of the word is the task of the singers. But a thing even more memorable, again in Rome and again in the 80s, remains a concert performance of Khovanshchina by a team of the Sofia Opera Theatre in one of RAI s recording studios. I must say that only very rarely can a stage production surpass the expressivity of this  concert , whose extraordinariness was not only in the beauty of the sound of the orchestra and the choir, not only in the supreme professionalism of all musicians, but also in the profound convincingness of all characters, and especially of Ghiuselev s Dosifey, which have left a truly unforgettable imprint in my memory. I fully agree with Russian musicologist Yuri Korev when he writes of this performance:  Ghiuselev s Dosifey is a remarkable achievement in modern performing arts. In this line of thought, it should be reminded that Ghiuselev is one of the most valued foreign artists in Russia. In conclusion, it could be said that a true interpretation comes from the mind and the heart, from the sincere and passionate exploration of the part: this is what Ghiuselev s career demonstrates, the career of a culturally aristocratic artist, who at the same time  and I can testify for this in person, together with numerous other colleagues  is a most pleasant person, a nice and enchanting interlocutor, a professional one can easily work with and learn so much from. Last but not least, he is an artist approaching music with ultimate humility. </p> <p><span class="style2">Amelia Imbarrato</span><br /> </p> </div> </div> <div id="image-bottom"> </div> <div id="menu" style="left: 0px; top: 258px; height: 500px"> </div> <div id="picture"> <a href="introduction.html"> <img alt="8:>;0 N75;52" src="../images/rotate6.jpg" style="z-index: 2;"/></a></div> <div id="menu_text"> <ul> <li class="main"><a href="introduction.html">» Introduction</a></li> <li class="main"><a href="critics.html">» Critics</a></li> <li class="main"><a href="awards.html">» Awards</a></li> <li class="main"><a href="discography.html">» Discography</a></li> <li class="main"><a href="repertory.html">» Repertoire</a></li> <li class="main"><a href="gallery.html">» Gallery</a></li> <li class="main"><a href="voice.html">» From the stage</a></li> <li class="main"><a href="operna-studia.html">» Opera mastery</a></li> <li class="main"><a href="news.html">» News</a></li> <li class="main"><a href="contacts.html">» Contact</a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </body> </html>