WHEN Ukrainian bass operatic singer Taras Berezhansky started studying the role of Attila the Hun, which he will perform for Opera Australia soon, he didn’t spend a lot of time on history.

Attila’s reputation, after all, precedes him, and to Berezhansky far more important was the complexity of the character which Giuseppe Verdi and his librettist Temistocle Solera created in the opera, which was a thinly veiled argument for Italy’s independence from Austria.

“He may be a negative character, but he has passions, he has life… He has a lot of enemies, but he feels like a real guy,” Berezhansky tells me by phone from Sydney. 

Until not long ago Berezhansky was living with his wife and daughter in the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, where he had studied at the National Pedagogical University of Ukraine and National Music Academy of Ukraine 

“But in Kyiv, we had 10 of the most terrible days I can remember… I was also working at the opera house in Lviv in the western part of Ukraine and so we have moved there – it’s further south and east and the capital is too much of a target,” he says.

He’s just landed in Sydney when I speak to him – “I never dreamt I would perform in this wonderful place,” he says.

But Ukraine is a country with deeper musical roots than ours. 

“As a singer, you start your professional studies in the national music academy but it’s been a long journey. I took a lot of masterclasses wherever I could and it was very difficult to get a job at first, but then I won a competition in Estonia and after that, my international career started,” he says.

One of his earlier roles was playing the bass part of Leporello, the cunning servant of Don Giovanni in Mozart’s opera, a major role.

“Thanks to Mozart and Verdi, we have a job. Being a bass usually means being a father or a priest, but these two composers have given seriously good roles to singers at the lower register, although I prefer Verdi for my voice,” he says.

He’s performed before for Opera Australia, as Colline in “La Bohème” and Sparafucile in “Rigoletto, and he performed Attila just twice in 2020 before covid struck and it was cancelled.

It’s a co-production with La Scala, in Milan, directed by Italian director Davide Livermore, known for his huge digital backdrops, although this time the revival director is Kate Gaul. 

A favourite part is where he performs on horseback. He’s not an expert horse rider and had to practice for his first performances in Sydney. 

“It was quite good until I had to jump off… riding the horse is not all that hard, but jumping off is.”

Luckily his horse Zulu is a very well-trained horse and he believes that the two horses in this production are the most expensive of all the performers.

“It’s an interesting opera for the audience because it mixes the good and the bad,” he says. 

“I have a marvellous aria, ‘Mentre gonfiarsi l’anima’ [As my heart seemed to swell], a very difficult aria with some very high notes for a bass.

“I’m telling my slave friend Uldino about the dream I saw of Pope Leo… I wanted to conquer the Roman Empire, but after that I decided to step back, it’s a crucial point.” 

It’s all downhill from there and in the end Attila is dispatched by his wife, the Italian Odabella – that’s almost certainly not true, but it ends the opera effectively. 

At 37, Berezhansky is entering the prime age for an opera singer. When he returns to Ukraine, he will perform in the Lviv Opera House, still going strong, and says the crisis in his home country has made him see the power of music and all of the arts.

Like many other Ukrainian singers, Berezhansky has performed in Russian operas, notably in “Eugene Onegin” and “Iolanta”, both by Tchaikovsky.

“It’s quite difficult to talk about this,” he says. “But for us Ukrainians, we have stopped performing Russian music.”

But he has a contract to play in the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, and if he had to perform in a Russian work, how would he approach the situation? 

“I think if there were a way, I would use it as a weapon against the Russians,” he says. 

Verdi’s “Attila”, Sydney Opera House, October 29-November 5.

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