Vladimir Rosing
[2] Vladimir Rosing's best-known recordings are his performances of Russian art songs by composers such as Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Gretchaninov, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov.
[8][9] When Tsar Nicholas II visited Moscow, Vladimir and his family attended a performance of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin, with the baritone Mattia Battistini, at the Bolshoi Theatre.
Rosing completed his studies at the Gymnasium (school) which lasted for eight years in Russia, and the family spent summers on their country estate in Podolia, Ukraine.
To please his father, a successful lawyer, Rosing reluctantly studied law at Saint Petersburg University, where he was very active in the fiery student politics that followed the first Russian Revolution of 1905.
When his parents finally accepted the primacy of his musical interests, he began to study voice with Mariya Slavina, Alexandra Kartseva, and Joachim Tartakov.
[nb 1] After spending the 1912 season in St. Petersburg as an up-and-coming tenor with Joseph Lapitsky's innovative Theatre of Musical Drama, appearing as Lensky in Eugene Onegin and as Hermann in The Queen of Spades, Vladimir Rosing made his London concert debut in Albert Hall on May 25, 1913.
[20] In 1914, he signed a 6-year contract with impresario Hans Gregor to perform leading tenor roles at the Vienna Imperial Opera, but World War I broke out before the fall season started, and Rosing returned to London.
[23] He socialized with writers like Ezra Pound, George Bernard Shaw, Hugh Walpole and Arnold Bennett, and his circle included the artists Glyn Philpot, Augustus John, Walter Sickert and Charles Ricketts.
Rosing presented the English premiere of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades and introduced Tamaki Miura in Madama Butterfly, the first Japanese singer to be cast in that opera's title role.
[42] With his friends, writer William C. Bullitt and sculptor Clare Sheridan, Rosing organized the last concert of the tour in New York on March 10, 1922, as a benefit for Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration, raising money to help fight the terrible famine in Russia.
[48] With George Eastman's backing, Rosing envisioned professionally training a group of young American singers and turning them into a national repertory company, performing opera across the United States in easy-to-understand English translations.
The group of artists that came to work with Rosing in Rochester included Eugene Goossens, Albert Coates, Rouben Mamoulian, Nicolas Slonimsky, Otto Luening, Ernst Bacon, Emanuel Balaban, Paul Horgan, Anna Duncan, and Martha Graham.
[58] Summer 1927 was spent rehearsing in Magnolia, Massachusetts, for the fall season and performing at Leslie Buswell's private theater at his nearby mansion, Stillington Hall.
The group earned an official endorsement from President Herbert Hoover, who called for it to become "a permanent national institution",[61] but as the country sank into the Great Depression the company was forced to disband.
[64] Rosing signed a new contract with the Parlophone Company and, (with the help of accompanists Ivor Newton, Myers Foggin, and Peter Gellhorn), recorded 32 discs (with the new electrical method) between 1933 and 1937.
[65] Rosing directed a musical production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals with songs by Herbert Hughes and John Robert Monsell which was staged at the Kingsway Theatre in September 1935.
The film studios lent their stable of stars, and with the help of talented servicemen Rosing directed over 20 productions of musical theater and light opera for the troops.
Under the banner of the American Opera Company of Los Angeles, he directed Tosca, The Barber of Seville, and Faust in 1947 with an up-and-coming young bass named Jerome Hines.
For KFI-TV in 1949, Rosing presented 46 weeks of live televised opera sequences on Sunday afternoons which were voted Outstanding Musical Program of Local Origin by the Southern California Association for Better Radio and T.V.
Over the next decade Rosing directed ten more productions for the NYCO, including Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe which ran for two seasons in 1958 and featured the role debut of soprano Beverly Sills.
[79] In 1950, as California was celebrating one hundred years of statehood, Rosing directed a new production of Faust with Nadine Conner, Jerome Hines and Richard Tucker, which opened the Hollywood Bowl's summer season.
[80] Rosing's work was noticed by the producers of the upcoming The California Story, the official state centennial production to be mounted in the Bowl that fall, and he was asked to direct it.
[83] Rosing also directed three more operas at the Hollywood Bowl: Die Fledermaus[nb 7] in 1951, Madama Butterfly with Dorothy Kirsten in 1960, and The Student Prince with Igor Gorin in 1962.
Rosing's last opera there, in 1962, was Borodin's Prince Igor, also with Boris Christoff—a production that featured sets by Nicola Benois, choreography by Ruth Page and dancing by Rudolf Nureyev, newly arrived in the West from Russia.
[89] The success of The California Story at the Hollywood Bowl in 1950 led to the show's revival in similarly grand fashion for San Diego's annual Fiesta del Pacifico in 1956, 1957, and 1958.
After a disappointing failure to win bi-partisan support in the Northern and Southern states for this ambitious project, Rosing then conceived of an even bigger production that would instead tell the story of freedom itself.
When he believes that pure song is voice to the music in hand, he sings with clear regard for well-shaped, transparent tone, sustained line, warm, felicitous Italian phrasing, adept modulation, spun transition, plastic progress, apt climax.
For such purpose, he bends or breaks rhythms, chops or fuses phrases, zigzags the melodic line, sharply changes pace or accent, emphasizes contrast, multiplies climax.
To gain these ends he uses unashamed what the vestal virgins of song call vocal tricks—the falsetto, for example, or the long-sustained note, swelled, diminished, melted almost inaudibly into the air.
Irish poet Patrick MacDonogh (1902–1961) writes about listening to Vladimir Rosing's recording of Rachmaninoff's "Ne poy krasavitsa, pri mne" in part two of his poem "Escape to Love".
