«Actual intoning» in the vocalperforming practice of Tetiana Vierkina (based on the romance repertory)

Background. Objectives and methodology of the research. An attempt is made to consider the vocal-performing work of the People’s Artist of Ukraine Tetiana Vierkina in the aspect of the “actual intoning” concept, which was developed in her PhD thesis. “Actual intoning” is interpreted by the researcher not only as the performer’s work, who turned the author’s text into the sound reality, into a living speech utterance, but also as the desire to fill her interpretation with relevant meanings that are significant for the modern era. The scientific work by T. Vierkina, devoted to the problems of intoning, grew out from a generalization of her many years of experience – artistic and pedagogical. However, in the field of view of the musicologists studying the performing art of T. Vierkina, mainly, her pianistic mastery proves to be. However, in Ukraine, as in the cities of Russia, Armenia, Georgia, Belarus, T. Vierkina is also known as a chamber singer, the owner of a very beautiful soprano, a performer with a peculiar manner of singing. Being not as powerful and dense as opera voices, the singer’s voice nevertheless sounds good in large concert halls with the accompaniment of symphony orchestras thanks to her technique of bright, sonorous sound. Having a recognizable, unique timbre, Tetiana Vierkina subordinates it to the tasks of expressively meaningful singing, finds her place among the intellectual type of singers. Two main directions in her vocal repertoire are defined – domestic, classical romance, pop songs of the 19th–20th centuries, on the one hand, and chambervocal music by Kharkiv composers, on the other. The purpose of this article is to consider only one direction in the vocal performing creativity by T. Vierkina related to her romances singing repertoire. The research is based on five romances representing the Pushkin-Glinka era –“You’ll never understand my sadness” by A. Gurilev to the poem of V. Beshentsov, “Don’t wake her at the dawn” by A. Varlamov to the poem of A. Fet, “When minute of the life is hard” to the poem of M. Lermontov – and the “Silver Age” of Russian poetry:“No, he didn’t love” by A. Guercia to the poem of E. Del Preite, in the Russian translation of M. Medvedev and “The Lord’s Ball” by A. Vertinsky to the poem of the author. An analysis of the interpretations of these works is included in the historical context, referring to some other interpretations of their musical text, to reveal the originality of the images and meanings created by T. Vierkina. The features of the artist’s creative formation and the circumstances of her life, which influenced her performing style, are taken into account. Thus, the general scientific methods of historical retrospection, comparison, generalization are used in this work, as well as the complex methodology of analytical musical-theoretical researches that correlated with B. Asafiev’s theory of intonation. Research results. The paper describes main features of the singing art of T. Vierkina, the artist with a beautiful timbre of her voice, which has a wide range capable of covering both soprano and mezzo-soprano. A brief overview of the vocal performance of T. Vierkina as a chamber singer is presented. The role of the Petersburg vocal teacher Raisa Christie, under whose guidance T. Vierkina perfected her singing technique and was supported in her search for an intonationally meaningful manner of singing, is shown. Turning to the analytical material, the author emphasizes means of expressiveness, with the help of which the singer creates completely different images on the basis of five romances. High, penetrating elegiac character of the Glinka type in the work of A. Gurilev is combined with the subtle understanding of the dialogical nature of the romance genre – the singer interprets each verse as an increasingly tense “phase” in her communication with an invisible interlocutor. In the song-romance of A. Varlamov, the singer goes by the parallelism of images of nature and a young beauty. The singer organizes the couplet-stanza form in a three-part composition, where the first and last sections (the nature waking up at sunrise plays with morning colors on the cheeks of a sleeping girl) contrast with the central one, in which the image of the night, the time of love anxieties and longings, dominates. At first, the singer’s voice is distinguished by its primary “instrumentality”, ease and purity of sound, while in the “night scene” it acquires greater density, verbal expressiveness. In the Bulakhov’s elegy, subtle penetration into the composer’s concept, which comes in a certain contradiction with Lermontov’s intent, makes it attractive. The poet reveals the effect of prayer as a process that begins “when minute of the life is hard”, and ends with the liberation of the hero from the burden of doubt. Bulakhov, on the contrary, choosing for the romance a gloomy, mournful tonality in B minor keeps it unchanged throughout the entire work, with the exception of episodic deviation to the parallel major, emphasizing the static contemplation of the image of the hero, who thinks suffering itself as grace, as effort of the soul aspiring to God. When considering the last two romances (“No, he didn’t love” and “The Lord’s Ball”), references were made to the interpretations of other performers, who each in their own time and in their own way updated these works (V. Komissarzhevskaya, N. Alisova, A. Vertinsky, V. Vysotsky and others). T. Vierkina’s versions of the two romances are analyzed. The first one attracts with light associations with the free gypsy style of singing (improvisation, use of the larynx-nasal timbre, changing of the metro-rhythm, compression-stretching, free transitions from tempo slowdowns to accelerated movement, transitions from singing to chanting words, etc.). In the song-arietta by A. Vertinsky, the emphasis is on elegance, intonation of sympathy for the heroine, whose life flew in ghostly dreams. The singer narrates, distancing herself from the heroine, then, seems to transform into her, then comments, rising above the “action”. Conclusions. Works created almost two centuries ago, performed by T. Vierkina, become significant and relevant for her contemporaries. In the romance she emphasizes the richness and depth of emotional experiences, which turns it into a kind of “encyclopedia” and, at the same time, “school of feelings”. This school, according to the singer, is called upon to resist the ever-increasing impoverishment of the emotional life of people in the era of technological progress and the increasing popularity of communications in the virtual space of the Internet. T. Vierkina believes that with the classic romance the art of representing ordinary human feelings in the light of a high ideal, reflecting them openly, sincerely, and confidentially, is a part of our life. Evenings of T. Vyerkina’s romances have always been significant events in the musical life of Kharkiv, which drew the attention of the public. The singer’s desire to “actualize” the genre, make it a “barometer” of the moods of her contemporaries, always find support among admirers of her artistic talent – all the singer’s concert performances end with “mass singing” – performance of some popular romance by all the listeners in the hall.