Vitas, the Russian hottie - soprano so high you'll faint
Vitas
Russian charismatic tenor Vitas is quietly taking the airwaves by storm, singing until the universe explodes
He's continually moving between reality and myth - his voice, his music, his poetry, his experiences and his appearance, everything about him is the center of discussion and causes incredible rumors.
Vitas Forever .......................
His name is Vitas Russian name Виталий Грачев vitali grachov
He was the youngest singer to hold a solo show in the Kremlin.
He is very secretive because he doesn't give any interviews to the media.
His real name is hardly known and no one knows where to find him.
He lives in a basement and only crawls out of his coffin like a spider at dusk to start creating.
He had a cool singing voice like a castrato singer, all natural, with a high part that was hard to distinguish between male and female.
His eyes, like a ghost's, instantly render you defenseless as if under a spell.
He especially likes fish, so some people speculate that Vitas can soar so high because he has gills.
Most unexpectedly, he's also a clothing designer.
Last June, Vitas traveled to Tibet for a three-week stay, and monks from India were extremely shocked by his songs, even saying that things in the temple flew while he sang, and claiming that Vitas was the reincarnation of a famous 11th-century Indian poet, musician and philosopher.
Is the truth behind the mysterious Russian tenor indeed as rumored? Could it be that his producers are "hyping" him up for a huge conspiracy? And is his singing for real or not?
We hope the following article will shed some light on this.
Movement 1: Fairytale of Odessa
Every legend has a beginning, and this one begins with Vitas producer Sergey Pudovkin's strange encounter in Ukraine.
Once upon a time there was a little guy named Vitalik who lived in a place far, far away. Growing up, Vitalik had no ambitions, and if memory serves, he used to go to an art school in Odessa every day.
Odessa, a city in Ukraine, is a heroic city for Russians and Ukrainians, famous for its beauty, its theater. Odessa has warmly hosted many artists: Kandinsky, Gogol, Majakovski, Pushkin ...... and many others who lived there doing nothing, or maybe that's the life of an artist.
Vitalik is no different, and like those great artists, he's not Ukrainian. His late mother was Russian and his father Latvian from the Baltics.
Actually, Vitalik doesn't look very Russian -- his long nose and long, wiry frame make him look a little more northern.
I mean, it was a handsome teenager, and very talented. He was born on February 19, 1980 or 1981 (this is not very certain so far) in Latvia. Before going to school, he played the accordion every day with his grandfather in Odessa. It is said that the performances were very funny, because at that time Vitalik was not as tall as an accordion.
He studied the accordion for three years, so as soon as he entered the Odessa Academy of Arts, the rector, Anatolii Paduka, knew that the boy was a gift from heaven. Soon after, Vitalik began working as an amateur actor in a theater with a strange name. In any case, if it weren't for the arrival of a famous producer from Moscow, Sergei Pudafkin, Vitalik would probably still be performing in such theaters today.
The bright young producer who created the legend of NA-NA, which debuted in 1971, but never mind that, when he came to Odessa, he happened to see Vitalik on stage. Vitalik shifted between the roles of a child and an old man at will, his voice changing at once from that of a little girl to a young lady, then to that of a man who had lived through the ages, and finally to that of an old woman. His face changed from extremely beautiful to extremely ugly, and his posture instantly changed from sexy and charming to strong and powerful. Stunned, Sergei asked him, "What is your name?" "Vitalik." "I'm Sergei, want to go to Moscow?" "When?" "Leaving the day after tomorrow." "What do you do?" "I'm an agent. Can I hear your tape?" The sound of a piano, as if coming from the bushes.Vitalik pulls out of his school bag four cassettes with songs recorded on them, among them the famous Opera 2.Vitalik uses magic to premonitory his way. Sergei told him, "I'm going to take you to Moscow, and I'm going to turn you into a big star of Russian pop(note 1)."
Movement 2 The Myth of the Kremlin
I'm not quite sure if this story is true, or maybe it's just a beautiful legend created by Sergei to make the whole thing seem more mysterious and coincidental. But one thing is true, Odessa's Vitalik became a musical miracle just two months after his debut under the stage name Vitas - by 2000, Vitas had become the youngest guy to hold a solo show at the Kremlin.
Vitas made his first appearance in front of an audience in MTV's "Opera 2," which aired on Dec. 2, 2000, and since then he's been constantly moving between reality and myth -- his voice, music, poetry, experiences and appearance, all of which he's become the center of discussion and has given rise to incredible rumors.
Two of the most popular rumors about him are. The first one is --- "Is that Vitas singing through the clouds"? People want to ask if his high notes are computer synthesized. Even Pugacheva (Note 2) also wondered about this, so the heroine of the opera decided to find out for herself, she went straight to the rehearsal site of the "Christmas Encounter", and found that it was Vitas who was singing intently with the sheet music, Pugacheva was very shocked, and her suspicions naturally disappeared. Sometimes Vitas has been known to pull a few pranks, such as taking the microphone away from him during a concert so that the sound goes out.
Sergei said, "You wouldn't know it, but Vitas is not only a genius, but he loves his work and strives for perfection. If he's even a little bit unsure about those songs, he's restless until he figures it out. Take, for example, the time he sang Gomshatova's poem "Friends in Shape," and when Alexandra Bakhmtova heard Vitas sing it for the first time she said 'I was so excited that I burst into tears, both because of the music and because of his performance.' But she didn't know that Vitas had been rehearsing the show for a whole week before the performance.
As for the other rumor, which, truth be told, remains the biggest mystery about him to this day -- was he a castrato singer (note 3)?
Neither Vitas nor Sergei has ever answered this question positively, with Sergei simply saying, "This question will hurt his inner world and ruin his future, but it doesn't mean that Vitas will remain silent forever, it's just that now is not the time. All I can tell you is that Vitas doesn't smoke, and he's pretty average about alcohol: you can drink it or not. So the one way left is women, and didn't you guys say he had five of them?" Although these statements don't mean anything, from the outside, Vitas is anything but "gorgeous", his muscles are really beautiful, and his male vocals are natural, with nothing out of place, except for the high notes, which are androgynous and eerie in an intimidating way. More people would like to believe that he was merely imitating the singing style of a castrato singer, whose voice can only be described as a gift from God.
The notion that Vitas is an alien with gills is also widely circulated among his admirers.
Because when a one-of-a-kind miracle can't be explained, we have to associate it with the world of fantasy. Sergei explained to journalists, "It's not a complete fabrication, but in fact Vi?tas does have a very special throat and neck structure. It's a truly incomparable gift that, to put it bluntly, seems to have arisen off the planet."
Movement 3 No Comment Ending
Despite the fact that Vi?tas has been taking the world by storm since he was just 19 years old with "Opera 2," to this day he has not given any interviews to the press, which is said to have been Sergei's intention, and it certainly seems to be the right thing to do now.
"Vitas never gives interviews to anyone," is a truth everyone knows in Russia.
Sergei explains his position this way: "We don't give any interviews, not because I, as a manager, want to add to the mystery of Vitas, but because I've been in the entertainment business for so many years that it's become clear to me that the public pays too much attention to the details of the celebrities' private lives to care about their creativity. And media that specialize in covering music are practically non-existent in our country, and the news about Vi?tas is always just shallow expectations - who he's sleeping with, what he's eating, what brand his cell phone is, etc. All of this is after-dinner gossip that has nothing to do with music, and I don't like that kind of reporting, which I call 'kitchen issues' and has absolutely nothing to do with Vitas." But according to Facts and Figures, the reason why Vitas, the most mysterious singer on the Russian music scene today, never gives interviews is that - when journalists ask Vitas' manager Sergei to organize press conferences, Sergei makes thousands of dollars of unimaginable demands of journalists. The reason is that when journalists ask Vitas' manager Sergei to organize a press conference, Sergei offers them thousands of dollars, which is unthinkable, and so until now the singer has only been able to collect a few bits and pieces of Sergei's releases, which are of course free.
So Vitas, whose every stage image is mysterious and furtive, has a thin veil attached to his private life.
At the end of the day, all we need to know is that Vitas has a very full schedule: theater performances, concerts in various Russian cities, movies and serials, his own costume design, a book of poems to be published, a world tour, an Asian tour in the works by his manager... ...
Note 1 The Russian Pop Scene
For most of us, Russian pop music is a blind spot, rarely mentioned except by groups such as TATU, who were once on fire.
In fact, Russian pop today is no different from that of most European countries, if not even edgier and more thoughtful, and Vitas, an award-winning star on his debut, is likely to once again bring pop music from Russia to the world.
But Russian pop music faces the problem that the role of older pop stars and producers is too strong. If you want to be a star, you have to be cast under a famous producer or a former singer, because they monopolize the resources of pop music. In response, Lin Chin, secretary of the Russian embassy's press and cultural service, said, "This situation must be broken by a great rock band."
Note 2 Pugacheva
Pugacheva has been called the godmother of Russian music. At the time, there was a widely circulated saying in Soviet folklore. One person asked, "Do you know who Brezhnev is?" Another replied, "Of course I know, he was a political figure in Pugacheva's time." Pugacheva's name was second only to President Vladimir Putin's in a 2004 questionnaire titled "The Elite in the Eyes of Russians," conducted by the authoritative All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion. Russia's first President Boris Yeltsin liked to listen to Pugacheva sing, April 15, 1999 Pugacheva's 50th birthday, Boris Yeltsin specially invited her to the Kremlin, for the Russian singing veteran awarded the second class of the Order of the Fatherland. Yeltsin happily recalled with Pugacheva the joke about "Brezhnev living in Pugacheva's time," and Yeltsin said wryly, "It is an honor for me to live in Pugacheva's time."
Note 3 Eunuch singers
By the end of the 18th century, eunuch singers played a major, and often decisive, role in opera. The Italians even regarded musicians as synonymous with castrati. Charles Paney, the famous British music historian, once described the scene when Farine sang in London in 1734: "He handled the preceding tune with such delicacy that it was astonishing. When the song ceased, there was a burst of applause, which lasted five minutes. When the applause subsided, he continued to sing, very briskly and pleasantly. The rhythm was so brisk that it was difficult for the violin to keep up." Even the famous French playwright Voltaire, who was always prejudiced against the eunuchs, admitted: "They (referring to the eunuchs) have a wonderful singing voice, better than women." Although the singing voice is wonderful, but the castration method to retain the boy without voice before the clear, beautiful voice of the practice is, after all, against modern morality, so the 18th century after the castrati singers disappeared.
There are many theories about Vitas, including one about whether the Russian singer was a castrato singer, which is supposed to be just a rumor, with no real evidence, and that his male vocals are very natural, with nothing out of place, and it's only in the soprano part that he's androgynous and has a kind of creepy beauty that shocks people. Whether it's not or not, the high notes are really particularly gripping. If he had just mimicked a castrato singer, his voice could only be called God's reward.
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