COVER STORY: COMPETITION WINS
Sing it to win it
J
une 2019 brought major competition victories for two of Askonas Holt’s younger singers: in Wales the 31-yearold Ukrainian baritone Andrei Kymach became BBC Cardiff Singer of the World; in St Petersburg the Greek bass Alexandros Stavrakakis, who is 30, took First Prize and Gold Medal at the XVI International Tchaikovsky Competition. Music competitions – by their very existence or through divergent opinions on the contestants – can sometimes cause controversy, but there is no denying the influence that these two events,
16 The Green Room Autumn 2019
Andrei Kymach gives his winning performance in Cardiff © Kirsten McTernan
Andrei Kymach, Alexandros Stavrakakis & AH Executive Director Mark Hildrew speak to Yehuda Shapiro about recent competition successes and the place for competitions in a singer's career
with their starry juries and strong media presence, can have on a singer’s career. “Cardiff was like a storm, but any competition helps an artist to grow,” says Andrei Kymach, who studied in Kiev before joining the young artists’ programme at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. It was in the Russian capital that he auditioned for Askonas Holt’s Executive Director Mark Hildrew, who has managed such previous Cardiff prizewinners as Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Elīna Garanča and Andrei Bondarenko. That was in
Autumn 2018, around the time that Kymach applied to the BBC using a concert video recorded on a friend’s phone. “It was my dream to take part in Cardiff Singer of the World,” he continues. “When I started at the conservatory in Kiev, I saw that competitions could help to launch a professional career.” He sent videos to Plácido Domingo’s Operalia, the Moniuszko Competition in Warsaw and Neue Stimmen in Germany, but was not invited to participate. Cardiff is a biennial event and he had submitted an entry for the 2017 edition too, only to be rejected.
