Bogdanov has Made Long Journey to Opera Stardom

For Aleksey Bogdanov, who was featured in the recent highly acclaimed Atlanta Opera production of Richard Wagner’s “Twilight of the Gods,” the road to the operatic stage spotlight started with a chance appearance on public broadcasting’s “A Prairie Home Companion.”

He was in the graduate music program at Indiana University determined to make opera his career when Garrison Keillor brought his iconic program to town. Out of several students who auditioned for the show, Bogdanov was chosen to sing two arias.

It was the kind of exposure that might have ended up as a line or two on a professional resume for a young singer just starting his professional career.
But, in the radio audience that evening was an official of the National Opera in Washington, D.C., who helped run a program to develop young singers. And, later, when Bogdanov auditioned for what is an important first step for a developing singer, the official remembered that broadcast.

“There were five finalists, and when I did the audition, one of the people who ran the program, said, ‘You know, I was driving down the highway, listening to ‘Prairie Home Companion’ and this voice came on the radio, and it was you, and she said, I’m impressed, who is that guy?’ And then, my application came in to the company and they said, we have to have you.”

The experience he gained at the prestigious Washington National Opera was a major break for the young singer. He worked with one of America’s the most important companies, headed by Placido Domingo, the great singer and conductor who was also largely responsible for the young artists program. It helped launch his career, where an early role was Escamillo in the Atlanta Opera’s production of Bizet’s “Carmen.”

Over the years, he’s appeared with many of the nation’s most important opera companies including the Metropolitan in New York and at Carnegie Hall for Handel’s “Messiah.” In addition to the important role of Albrecht in the Atlanta Opera’s concluding production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle,” he’s coming back later in the year for their December holiday production of Kevin Puts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning work, “Silent Night.”

It’s been a long and successful journey for Bogdanov, who came to America with his family in 1992. He was born in Odessa, in the former Soviet Union, and was part of the exodus of Russian Jews who had long suffered religious persecution. Despite the difficulties, Odessa had a history as a center of Jewish social and cultural life. It gave the world the great violinists, Mischa Elman and David Oistrakh, the novelist and short story writer, Isaac Babel, and before the Russian revolution, the great cantor, Pinhas Minkowski. And its elegant opera house was world famous.

Aleksey Bogdanov was only 9 when he and his family arrived in the United States. They were forced to leave everything behind when they came as part of the exodus of Jews from that country in the early 1990s. He didn’t speak a single word of English and most of what he knew about his new home in America he learned from watching VHS video tapes in Odessa of Hollywood movies.

“My parent had been trying to leave for a long time. Odessa was a very unstable when we left in 1992,” he said, “but we all dreamed of getting out. It was our American dream.”

Like so many young Russian Jews who came to America during those years, he adapted to American life quickly. He learned English by listening to the TV teen age sit-com, “Saved By The Bell” and Batman movies and, by the time he was in the sixth grade, he had mastered the language and had come to a new appreciation of his long suppressed Jewish heritage.

He is married now with two children, but, although he is frequently away from home, he always finds time in his busy schedule to celebrate Shabbat with them, even if it’s on a Zoom call or on his cell phone.

“It’s a tradition we always try to do. My wife and I want to give our children what I didn’t have, the opportunity to grow up Jewish. I have that privilege now, not to hide our Jewishness like we once did in Russia.”

The Atlanta Opera’s performance of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung,” or as it is known by its English title, “The Twilight of the Gods,” is the final opera in the four operas of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle.’ Their staging over the past four years has helped establish the Atlanta company as an important and innovative leader in America’s opera world. Under the inspiring leadership of the company’s artistic and executive director, Israeli-born Tomer Zvulun, the “Ring Cycle” here is the first American production of the Wagnerian operas since the pandemic and the first in the American South.