Artistic and performance interpretation of mezzo-soprano parts of Russian opera in the practice of music universities of China

Abstract

The artistic and performance interpretation of mezzo-soprano parts of the Russian operatic repertoire within the educational practice of music universities of China involves the simultaneous mastering of several heterogeneous layers: phonetic and articulatory, vocal and technical, stylistic, and dramaturgical. The divergence between the phonological systems of the Russian and Chinese languages, the difference in the principles of register organisation of the voice in the European and the national vocal traditions, and the cultural distance towards the emotional and semantic structure of Russian opera form a cluster of difficulties whose resolution predetermines the quality of stage embodiment. The aim of the work is to identify the stable typological difficulties of interpreting mezzo-soprano parts by Chinese performers and to correlate them with the methodological means of university training. The methods applied are the musicological analysis of scores and vocal parts, comparative-stylistic and conceptual-categorial analysis, and the typologisation of interpretive tasks. It is established that the greatest resistance is caused not by the tessitura itself but by the coordination of the chest register with the recitative-declamatory nature of the Russian operatic cantilena; the dramaturgical multidimensionality of mezzo-soprano images – Lyubasha, Marfa, Marina Mniszek, Konchakovna, the Countess – requires a restructuring of the stage-behaviour models habitual for the national school. Correlating the typology of difficulties with the set of methodological devices shows that the effectiveness of training is achieved by shifting the emphasis from the timbral-technical side to the meaning-generating work with the poetic text and the stage intonation, rather than by increasing the number of exercises.