Culture

AIGUL AKHMETSHINA

The fiery mezzo shaking up the global opera stage.

Whatever it takes to be an opera star these days, walking on stilts isn’t a widely recognised requirement. Nor is dressing up as a gorilla. But they’re useful sidelines for Aigul Akhmetshina, who has done both in her meteorically ascendant, if still young, career.

Modern stage directors ask a lot from singers: you can find yourself delivering an aria upside down on a trapeze – unless your contract rules it out. Akhmetshina isn’t someone who expects to come on stage, stand at a designated spot, and sing. She’s agile, physical, alive, which, with the happy combination of a rich, expansive mezzo voice and feisty charm, has made her one of the most thrilling – and marketable – figures on the international circuit. Aged just 28.

“Theatre is complex: if I wanted just to sing,” she says, “I’d stick to concerts. And if the director asks for strange things, I’m happy to try – so long as there are explainable reasons. I’m not against radical stagings, though it’s a shame that young people come to a piece such as Carmen and may never have seen it done traditionally. There needs to be a balance.”

Aigul Akhmetshina playing Carmen at the Royal Opera House in 2024. © Camilla Greenwell

As it happens, Akhmetshina is currently the go-to Carmen on the world stage, having starred in an astonishing 13 productions during recent years, beginning at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden (the notorious Barrie Kosky show with a gorilla-suited heroine), then taking in the New York Met, Glyndebourne, Berlin, Naples, Vienna… with another Covent Garden run returning soon. This time it’s a production by Damiano Michieletto. It has no gorillas but is still far from traditional, set in a dreary, small town in Spain with a wardrobe of jeans and T-shirts as opposed to picture-postcard frocks and castanets.

Doing the piece so often, you’d expect Carmen fatigue to set in. But apparently it doesn’t.

“Every time there’s something new. I’m never sure how it will go because the character is so full of possibilities: aggressive, vulnerable, flirty, grounded, femme fatale… You think you understand her, but you don’t: she’s unpredictable, ungraspable. So no, I don’t tire of her, but I do find it draining emotionally, getting killed night after night in so many different ways. And I’m never satisfied with how I play her: if I were, I’d stop because the challenge would go. All I can say is I play her through my own life experience. We have things in common.”

I’m never satisfied with how I play her [Carmen]: if I was, I’d stop because the challenge would go.

– Aigul Akhmetshina

Akhmetshina’s life experience is, indeed, a story. Born in a village in Bashkortostan, a remote part of the Russian Federation, 1,000 miles from Moscow, she was raised by a single mother in circumstances where people sang but with no obvious future on the world stage. The young Aigul liked folk music and Western pop, particularly Amy Winehouse. But from that unpromising start, she got herself, aged 14, into a performing arts school in a distant town where she lived independently and paid her way by waitressing and performing in a circus-style cabaret as a stilt walker.

“I was a teenager living like an adult,” she says, “where I come from, it’s normal: you learn to work hard early. I grew up fast, feeling life was too short to waste.”

At that school, a teacher suggested she change her voice from soprano to mezzo: a key development. Unfortunately, she was turned down by the celebrated Gnessin Academy in Moscow, which meant she had no proper conservatoire education. But luck intervened when she entered a competition and was noticed by the director of Covent Garden’s Young Artists Programme. So, aged 20, she relocated to London, where she spent the next six months lonely, unhappy, struggling to learn English, and “wanting every day to pack my suitcase and leave. A lot of people had supported me to be here – my mother had spent her savings – I couldn’t let them down. And I’m stubborn. I’m a Taurus. We don’t give up.”

Her reward was that the Royal Opera swept her into a reduced-scale Carmen playing the London fringe. Then, at 21, she found herself parachuted into the real thing on Covent Garden’s main stage when the scheduled star was indisposed. “I’d had no rehearsals with the orchestra or on the stage; I was terrified.”

Aigul Akhmetshina and Jonas Kaufmann in Werther at the Royal Opera House, London, in 2023. © Bill Cooper

Almost immediately, the conveyor belt of Carmen bookings started rolling – to the point where she now feels she’s ready not just to perform it but direct it: “One day, maybe. It would be more traditional, full of light and colour. This is not a grey piece.”

Akhmetshina understands the need to explore roles beyond the one she knows inside out. And there are plenty landing at her feet now, not least at the New York Met, where the administration is so in love with her she can virtually do what she likes.

Obvious choices are the bel canto Italians: Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini (she’s just been doing Norma in Vienna). But she also favours late 19th-century French: Massenet and Saint-Saens (with the latter’s Samson et Dalila scheduled next season). And somewhere on her wish list are the low-flying coloratura heroines of baroque opera. “People tell me they won’t suit my voice. I disagree.”

“Of course I’d like to work in my homeland […] My family are there. They’ve never heard me sing. […] I can only hope better days will come.”

– Aigul Akhmetshina

Whatever she has coming, though, it won’t be happening any time soon in her Russian Federation homeland where she’s hardly known. And it’s a sensitive issue. She is keen to say she’s not a Russian national – “I’m half Tatar, half Bashkir” – which, in the light of world events, is understandable. Her current home is London, and she’s trying (with some difficulty) to get British citizenship. But, until that happens, she travels on a Russian passport. And there’s pressure to take a public stand on Ukraine, which she’d rather avoid.

To date, she’s never played the Mariinsky or the Bolshoi and has no plans to do so. “I’ve not been asked. I’ve never met Valery Gergiev [the supreme fixer of state-sponsored musical life in Russia]. And I’m booked up until 2031. But of course, I’d like to work in my homeland. My family is there, they’ve never heard me sing, except on video. At the moment,t I don’t see a possibility. I only hope better days will come.”

Author: Michael White

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