Kirov Baritone Takes World Stage

NEW YORK -- Russian baritone Sergei Leiferkus never steps on stage without the woven Jamaican charm bracelet his wife bought for him from a street peddler.


She was in Milan, Italy, several years ago when the man stopped her, held up the multicolored band and said, "Give this to the man you love, it will bring him luck."


Apparently, it did. In the past few years, the 48-year-old singer's career has soared, from the Kirov Opera in his native St. Petersburg to the top international stages -- and far from the metal factory where he worked as a 15-year-old so his family could eat.


Perhaps luck did play some part in his rapid rise. But much more has shaped Leiferkus, the premier baritone of his generation. His fiery subtlety is the product of an actor-psychologist with superbly trained vocal chords.


His specialty: a collection of operatic villains savored by audiences.


This spring at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he transformed his tall, sturdy frame into the sniveling, cynical Iago, who propels tenor Placido Domingo's jealous Othello to strangle his wife at the end of Giuseppe Verdi's "Otello," an operatic version of Shakespeare's play.


Leiferkus said he models his baritone roles after modern cinema techniques. Like an actor, "I would stand before a mirror and look at myself, to see what to do, how to do it," he said of his preparations for Iago, an angry, frustrated military man who manipulates the Venetian Moor's emotions with knifelike articulation.


Opera, he says, "must be more acting than singing ... Without acting it's nothing."


Leiferkus has spent three decades joining the two arts. At 19, in the conservatory in Leningrad, he began a seven-year education studying drama along with voice.


Wherever he travels, he closely watches people to collect the characteristics for various roles. "Everywhere, people are the same, exactly the same," he said. "Deep in a Russian village, you can see the character of Iago, or the character of Othello, who probably kills his wife because he is drunk and jealous."


Responding to some critics who said his voice was not "big" enough for Iago, he says that often this villain must pretend to be "very, very polite," which translates into a lighter, "speaking" kind of voice. But Leiferkus does release his full, rich voice for another "bad guy" role, that of Scarpia, the evil Roman police chief who destroys two lovers in Verdi's "Tosca." He has been called one of the greatest Scarpias since the Italian Tito Gobbi, who defined the role in our time.


On the rare days when he isn't touring, he goes home to the village of Iffley, England, near Oxford, where he lives with his wife, a retired Russian ballerina. They have a 25-year-old son who attends college in England.


Since he moved to England three years ago, he has kept the family's apartment in St. Petersburg. What he got rid of was the Soviet "translator" -- usually a KGB agent -- who once accompanied him on his travels.


"But I hate it when people keep writing that I am a Russian singer. After all, they don't keep asking Domingo if he is Spanish or Mexican," Leiferkus notes. "He is simply Domingo."


And after all, in the baritone's life, the nationalities and languages all meld. In Paris, they call him by the French "Serge," in London, he is "Sirgee," and Opera News called him the "Power Serge."