Nightingale Anniversary of Yevheniya Miroshnychenko

Last Tuesday an outstanding Ukrainian opera singer and pedagogue celebrated her birthday. Yevheniya Miroshnychenko has never tried to conceal her age. She looks perfect at her seventy years. She is energetic and full of great plans.

Critics call her lyrical coloratura soprano the golden voice of Ukraine, comparing it to nightingale’s warbles. She is a true Ukrainian prima donna. Her image is an astonishing combination of a refined actress and Soviet woman. She sung before the leaders of the epoch: Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and won the favor of those in power. Today she often speaks in an unprejudiced way about the current situation performers face. But simultaneously she is in no way nostalgic for the past. She says that, of course, she could earn more as a pedagogue if she had gone abroad, but her roots are in her native land, and she prefers to share all the troubles of her country.

Miroshnychenko is a part of our national wealth and a legend of the opera stage. She graduated from the Kyiv Conservatory in Donets-Tesseyr’s class. The flowering of the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theater is connected with her name. Among her best parts are Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Rosina in Rossini’s Barber of Seville, the Queen of Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Venus in Lysenko’s Aeneide, Yolan in Maiboroda’s Milano, the Queen of Shemakha in Rimsky- Korsakov’s Le coq d’Or (The Golden Cockerel), and Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata. In the words of Miroshnychenko’s student and now soloist with the National Opera of Ukraine, Valentyna Stepova, Miroshnychenko is a genius as an actress and singer. Her forte is the high notes. Every opera performance she took part in was unique. She not only sang her vocal parts brilliantly but also created dramatic images of the heroines. She has been teaching at the National Music Academy for over twenty years, extending her artistic longevity in her students.