NEW YORK (AP) — Aigul Akhmetshina likes to explain herself as “just an regular woman from a little town in the middle of noplace in Russia.”
Not rather.
Akhmetshina began carryingout folk tunes of her native Bashkortostan while still a youngchild. Her household couldn’t payfor a piano, so her veryfirst instrument was a button accordion. At 14, she left home to researchstudy singing in Ufa, the nearby big city more than 100 miles away, where she supported herself at odd tasks like handing out leaflets while walking on stilts.
Now 27, this “ordinary woman” is taking on one of the highest-profile operatic projects possible: Headlining a brand-new production of Bizet’s ever-popular workofart “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera opening on New Year’s Eve.
It hasn’t been an simple journey from Ufa to New York. Along the method, Akhmetshina has had to gottenridof several obstacles, consistingof failures in vocal competitors, an vehicle mishap that left her notable to sing for months, then staking her hopes on a journey to Moscow just to be informed by a conservatory that she wasn’t great sufficient for a scholarship.
“I’m extremely persistent, however when you continuously hear you’re not gifted sufficient, you start thinking perhaps it’s real,” Akhmetshina stated in an interview. “All my accomplishments tookplace duetothefactthat I constantly had individuals around me who thought in me more than I did.”
Among those individuals she counts her instructor in Ufa, Nailya Yusupova, who stays her singing coach, and artists’ supervisor Marcin Kopec, who veryfirst heard her on a “scouting audition” in Russia when she was still a teen.
“I keepinmind her gettingin the space, a extremely positive young girl. She was recuperating after the carsandtruck mishap and was using a neck collar,” Kopec remembered. “When she opened her mouth, I rightaway sat directly. The color of the voice was like a dark chocolate, warm and stunning.”
Kopec lateron setup for David Gowland, head of the Royal Opera’s young artists program in Lond