French-Israeli bass-baritone Yuri Kissin interviewed by Murray Dahm
Yuri Kissin began his singing career in a most unusual way – he was a stand-up comedian and doing a sketch that parodied ‘opera singing.’
Yuri Kissin as Leporello in Opera Australia’s 2023 production of Don Giovanni at the Sydney Opera House
Photo Credit: Keith Saunders
Sure enough, someone in the audience ‘discovered’ him. A singing teacher at the music academy in Tel Aviv came up after the gig and said he had a real voice and could really be an opera singer, and, despite his doubts and reservations, Yuri took some lessons. Only four months later, he was accepted to study opera at Tel Aviv University, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Yuri performs Leoprello in the current Opera Australia production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni – he has performed the role in five separate productions around the world. However, this is his first visit to Australia. (I apologised on Australia’s behalf for the less-than-stellar weather he experienced during most of the rehearsal period – quite the opposite of what he was told to expect of an Australian summer). He has also performed the opera in the role of Masetto, one production as the Don himself and one as the Commendatore – as he says “I’m all over the opera”. One of the aspects of Don Giovanni is how many basses it has and how contrasting those roles need to be – from aristocratic and seductive (for the Don), comic and lowly (for Leporello and, to a lesser extent, Masetto), and the authority and otherworldliness of the Commendatore). Yuri was full of praise for the Don Giovanni in this production, the Ukrainian Andrei Kymach. He acknowledged that the voice needed for the role much have “a certain nobility” and added: “I should say, the Don Giovanni in this production, is a ‘freak of nature’ – a true high baritone with a very bassy colour. He’s able to do anything. His high A would, I say, explode our ears!’ This is, however, their first time performing together, and they have hit it off.
Aficionados of Don Giovanni will tell you that even though the opera is named after the Don, Leporello, in fact, sings much more. Indeed, he has the most notes to sing in the entire opera. When I pointed this out to Yuri, he replied that his reasons for preferring Leporello are more personal. I asked how coming to a new and different production changes the view and perception of the role (this one was originally directed by David McVicar in 2014 and here revived by Warwick Doddrell). Yuri replied: “I, personally, always try to bring myself to it. So I bring a bit of comedy to it. Even physically, I think I am much more a Leporello than a Don Giovanni – I’m a funny little Jewish guy, that’s what I do.’ Not to mention “servants are always working harder than their masters”! This production he terms ‘Dark Classical’ – eighteenth-century costumes but dark, not festive, in keeping with the tragedy and dark aspects of Don Giovanni’s character. Some productions emphasise the comedy, but the opera has always been one which is hard to categorise because of the seemingly contradictory elements of tragedy and comedy. “That is why this opera is always contemporary” Yuri pointed out. “It works every time because life is hard to understand and hard to categorise. It can go from the funny happy moments to the tragic in five minutes, so that’s how life is … there is nothing black and white in this opera.”
In the opera, there are tragic characters (Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, Don Ottavio, the Commendatore) and Comic Characters (Leoprello), low and high (Masetto and Zerlina along with Leporello being the low-born ones, all the others are aristocratic). Don Giovanni interacts with both high and low and tragic and comic, but it is Leporello who is the conduit between all the characters – why he has so much to sing and say. “In this production, I am less the servant and more the poor childhood friend of Don Giovanni.” In another production, he has played Leporello as the Don’s lawyer, dressed in contemporary suits. It says a great deal for Yuri’s point that the opera is always contemporary and that it can be adapted to almost any time period and setting. “ There are a lot of double meanings, triple meanings in the text” – and Yuri makes a good case that Lorenzo Da Ponte (the librettist) put a great deal of his own experiences into the actions of Don Giovanni – he was a notorious libertine himself.
Yuri speaks five languages – Russian, French, Italian, English and Hebrew. Indeed, he will be performing Varlaam (in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov) twice next year, as well as other comic Russian roles, although his voice suits the Italian repertoire much more. In French repertoire (where Yuri has lived for twenty years), he sings Manon, Werther, and Carmen. He has sung Sancho in Massenet’s Don Quichotte and Nilakantha in Lakmé (he even sang me an excerpt from the beautiful Nilakantha aria ‘Lakmé, ton doux regard se voile’). Gounod’s Mephistopheles from Faust is a favourite role. From Australia, he returns home briefly to see family and is then off to Israel for two productions – including an Il Trovatore and a brand new opera, Theodor, on Theodor Herzl the founder of Zionism composed in Hebrew and with a big scene added specifically for him. Other favourite roles include Figaro (the role he has performed the most) then Don Magnifico in Rossini’s Cenerentola, the villains of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann. As with Leporello, he prefers roles where he can be not just funny but can also bring colour and character to the roles he performs.
Don Giovanni is on stage at the Sydney Opera House until February 17.
