Jazzman to Divo....via an invisible gunKhachatur Badalyan stars in L’Opera de Montréal’s production of Rusalka and follows in long line of great Russian tenors
By Richard Burnett
(performance photos by Michael Daniel of the OdeM/Minnesota Opera production)
Russian tenor Khachatur Badalyan was starring in a production of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin at the Novaya Opera in Moscow in 2007 when in the middle of a scene in the third act everything went horribly wrong. “I had just finished a duet with [the character] Elsa and the bad guy is supposed to kill me with a sword,” Badalyan recalls. “So I’m supposed to grab a gun. But the prop guy forgot to put the gun where it was supposed to be onstage and I kept fumbling around for it. Meanwhile, the bad guy is looking at me like, “Are you going to shoot me or what?’ So I pretended to shoot him with magic. The baritone playing the bad guy just about died and the audience, they – they knew!”
But what a wonderfully long strange trip Badalyan’s career has been so far. In Montreal rehearsing for his starring role in Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s masterpiece Rusalka being presented by L’Opéra de Montréal, Badalyan says, “I studied since childhood to become a painter and I [had] almost finished the school when I decided to become an economst and even got [that] diploma from university. That’s when I decided to become a singer. In my family we always liked to listen to classical music. So I have always loved opera. But I never imagined it would become my profession.”
