I was born in the sunny Crimea, and I would say that my childhood was happy and cloudless. Crimean summers are long and warm, and when you spend them with a lovely family, it may seem that those summers never end. I was very lucky to have had such a happy childhood! I remember very well that as a child I loved drawing while listening to LPs. Sometimes I would have spent hours drawing pictures that appeared in my imagination as I was listening to songs and fairy tales.
My musical talent appeared since my childhood, so my mother brought me to the musical school when I was 5. At that point anybody had no more doubts about what I should start studying. Then, I still did not understand that I was not going to be studying 5 or 10 years, but all my life.
After that, there was the musical college, and in the end: the Moscow Conservatory! Here it started my real and serious journey through the Opera. Not right away I was conscious of the hardness of my profession. I was trying to be first in everything; good periods, bad periods, fighting even against myself. But one day, unfortunately I experienced -in the deepest of my heart- the feeling of emptiness. That was because day after day I had been giving all my best, beeing finally exhausted. In the musical field it is almost impossible to hide your inner world and introduce wrong and insincere emotions.
Every artist is «naked» on stage. What we artists express with our talent and acquired technique still has to come through the prism of inner feelings and individuality, which is easily hidden in real life, but not on the stage.
In that period of my life it was important to me to feel the support of my parents and friends, and to feel the belief in what I was doing. As soon as I changed my point of view on my profession I met my last teacher, Moscow Conservatory professor Marina Alekseeva, with whom I attended my last years of the Post Graduate Degree.
Now I have a lot of experience in performing, which undoubtedly gives me some kind of self-reliance, which allows me to feel more confident on stage. However, every day when I reharsal with an “open soul” – because it is impossible to do the opposite – I take a risk! The risk to destroy my inner harmony. No one will ever tell you which difficulties you have to deal with every day, no matter how well your artistic career is going: the stage anxiety which will always be there every time you go on stage, regardless of your experience; the different perseption of the world and the endless research of yourself in a society which sometimes is cruel, but in which you have to live in anyway.
Nonetheless, in conclusion I would like to say the most important thing: difficulties can be found in anything we do, but it is important to understand what we fight them for, to understand where is your place in life and what is your true calling. For me it is very important to see the grateful and enlightened faces of the people, that share my emotional experience that I am living through on stage. I come out on stage for those people, who came to get the portion of emotional energy, which will help them to transfigure and be carried away into a different, better world for at least a little while. I am myself getting an incredible energy from them. Now when I am writing this text once again I realize the importance of this non-verbal communication. If my performance can awake the inner beauty of at least one soul in the audience, then I can say, that my talent, given to me by God, is not wasted.
