Vasilisa Berzhanskaya
Russian mezzo-soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya has been a member of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin since 2017/18. Her roles with the company have included Rosina (Il barbiere di Siviglia), the Marchesa Melibea (Il viaggio a Reims) and Sonyetka (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District). Guest performances in 2017/18 included Angelina (La Cenerentola) in Basel and Rosina at the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St Petersburg. During the 2016/17 season she made her debut with the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow as Despina (Così fan tutte) and as the Marchesa Melibea in Pesaro.
Plans include her debut as Vagaus in Vivaldi’s Juditha triumphans at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam and as the contralto soloist in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. In Amsterdam she will also be heard as Aristea (L’Olimpiade) and will be returning to Basel as Rosina and to the Rossini Festival in Pesaro as Sinaïde (Moïse et Pharaon). Among the roles that she will be singing at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin are Rosina, Olga (Eugene Onegin), Vitellia (La clemenza di Tito) and Mercédès (Carmen).
Earlier engagements had taken her to the Russian Opera in Vladivostok, to the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg and to concerts in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow and New York’s Carnegie Hall as part of the 2015 International Musical Olympus Festival.
Vasilisa Berzhanskaya was born in Yessentuki and studied at the V.I.-Safonov Regional College of Music in Stavropol and with Ruzanna Lisitsian at the Gnessin State Musical College in Moscow. Between 2015 and 2017 she was a member of the Young Artist Programme at the Bolshoi, where her teachers included Dmitry Vdovin, who continues to coach her.
Vasilisa Berzhanskaya made her Salzburg Festival debut in 2017 as Frau Pfeil in The Impresario for Children as part of the Festival’s Young Singers Project. She is returning to Salzburg as Masha in The Queen of Spades.
Current as of July 2018