Singing, actress
For those of you who were stumped by Lady Number Six, here's the mysterious dame herself, Galina Vishnevskaya, in a more accustomed version of Lady Macbeth, the 1966 film by Mikhail Shapiro of Katerina Izmailova.
The great diva returned to the screen only last year in Alexandra (directed by Alexander Sokurov), playing an elderly woman who makes the trek to Chechnya to visit her grandson, who has been stationed there as a soldier for seven years.
The great diva returned to the screen only last year in Alexandra (directed by Alexander Sokurov), playing an elderly woman who makes the trek to Chechnya to visit her grandson, who has been stationed there as a soldier for seven years.
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9:41 AM
3 Comments:
I worship Vishnevskaya. Such a unique voice and such an actor. She's wonderful in that film clip in a way it's hard to imagine many singers managing in a straight role.
I highly recommend her autobiography to those who haven't read it- now there's a story. And her Libera Me on the old 50s russian recording of the Verdi Requiem is a definition of dementia.
Vishnevskaya is the rarest of divas, one whose real life makes her stage roles look uneventful by comparison.
According to one article she was a hirsute infant rejected by her mother and raised by her grandmother. During the seige of Leningrad she came within a hair of starving to death (the crews collecting the dead loaded her onto a cart with corpses before they realized she wasn't dead yet)
And that's just the start ....
armerjaquino said...
"I worship Vishnevskaya. And her Libera Me on the old 50s russian recording of the Verdi Requiem is a definition of dementia."
Hardly, though, to be set beside the recorded souvenirs of Joyce Barker and dear old Heather Harper in this music.
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