“Shtokolov was a singer who united the company with millions of music lovers, people who love melodies and songs. That made him a true phenomenon at the theatre.”
Valery Gergiev
The outstanding Russian singer Boris Timofeyevich Shtokolov (1930-2005) was for over thirty years a lead soloist at the Kirov-Mariinsky Theatre and, in a wider sense, a symbol of musical culture in Leningrad-St Petersburg. The exceptional beauty of his voice, his skill and his charm also won him acclaim at theatres in the USA, France, the UK, Spain, Sweden, Germany and Finland among other countries where he became known as the "Soviet Chaliapin". Shtokolov was famed as a great recitalist and a brilliant performer of folk songs and Russian romances.
Starting in 1959, for three decades Shtokolov performed at the Kirov Theatre as Susanin, Godunov, Dosifei, the Demon, Ruslan, Galitsky and Gremin.
When, in 1969, the Chicago Lyric Opera invited him to take part in a production of Khovanshchina the designer and director Nicholas Benois (son of Alexandre Benois), who for many years worked at La Scala and has done a great deal for Russian opera internationally, heard Shtokolov at a rehearsal, he said to him:
“I’ve never heard such a Dosifei. Sing and act as you like.”
“He had an incredible feel for the music, an innate sense of art,” recalls composer Tikhon Khrennikov, “in opera he embodied that folk spirit and hero-like power with which Russian fairy-tales and bylinas are imbued. He didn’t just have a deep sense of what he was singing, he was able to convey to the audience the primordial character of the musical images he embodied, to involve, perturb and amaze the audience. His performances in operas were a kind of “mono-performance”. I’d also point out his incredible sincerity, faith and the monologue-like character of his singing style, and that’s also a feature deeply rooted in the traditions of Russian song, the fairy-tale-song and the bylina-song.”
German Poplavsky
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