Irina Dolzhenko

Mezzo soprano

Born in Tashkent. After completing her studies at the Tashkent State Conservatoire, she joined the Natalia Sats Children’s Music Theatre Company. She took part in Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theatre productions. She studied in Italy with Mietta Sighele and Giorgio Luchetti.
Since 1996, she has been a soloist with the Bolshoi Theatre Opera Company.

Repertoire

Amneris (Aida)
Azucena (Il Trovatore)
Ulrica (Un Ballo in maschera)
Fenena (Nabucco)
Adalgisa (Norma)
Cherubino (Le Nozze di Figaro)
Olga (Eugene Onegin)
Morozova (Tchaikovsky’s The Oprichnik)
Amelfa (Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel)
Blanche (Prokofiev’s The Gambler)
Marina Mnishek (Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov)
Lehl, Spring (Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden)
Lyubov (Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa)
Lyubasha (Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s bride)
Suzuki (Madama Butterfly)
Third Lady (Die Zauberflote)
Polina, Milovzor (The Queen of Spades)
Carmen (Carmen)
Margret (Wozzeck)
Annina (Der Rosenkavalier)
Nenila (The Enchantress)

Also included in her repertoire are the mezzo-soprano parts in: the Requiems of Mozart and Verdi, the Stabat Maters of Dvorak, Pergolesi and Vivaldi, Vivaldi’s Gloria, Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, Sergei Taneyev’s At the Reading of a Psalm cantata and Symphony No. 1, Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata and Tchaikovsky’s Moskva cantata, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 and other works.

Tours

She has sung with the following, among other, companies: Vienna’s Kamer oper, Swedish Royal Opera (Stockholm), Deutsche oper (Berlin), the Teatro Colon (Buenos Aires; her first performance as Amneris), The New Israeli Opera (Tel Aviv; at the Company’s opening among other performances), Cagliari’s Teatro Lirico (2003; Morozova in The Oprichnik), Opera Bordeaux (2003; Saburova in The Tsar’s bride), Theatre du Chatelet (2003; Laura in Iolanta), Opera Bastille (2005; Matriosha in Prokofiev’s War and Peace).

She gives frequent performances in the Baltic states. She made her Tallin debut as Carmen at Estonia National Opera. She has worked with Latvian National Opera since 1999: her two main roles with this Company being Amneris (Aida) and Ulrica (Un Ballo in maschera). She has taken part in the Trakai Music Festival (Lithuania) where she sang Ulrica in the Festival production of Un Ballo in maschera. She has given concerts in Japan, Korea, Australia, the USA, Europe.

She frequently appears at the following and other music festivals: Schonbrunn (Austria), Savonlinna (Finland), The Mozart Festival in France, The Jerusalem Festival, The Festival of Forgotten Operas in Wexford (Ireland). In 2004, at the Stravinsky Festival, in the town of Arnhem (The Netherlands), she took part in a concert performance of the opera Mavra.

She has appeared with the outstanding conductors: Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Vladmir Fedoseyev, Valery Gergiev, Mikhail Pletnev, Vladimir Yurovsky.

Discography

Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila — Naina, conductor Alexander Vedernikov, PentaTone сlassic, 2004.
Tchaikovsky’s The Oprichnik — Morozova, conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Dynamic, 2004.