Oda Slobodskaya

Oda Slobodskaya (28 November/10 December 1888 – 30 July 1970Library of Congress authority file
/ref>) was a Russian soprano who became a British citizen.

Early life

Her biographer Maurice Leonard quotes Slobodskaya as having been born on 28 November 1888 in Vilno (now Vilnius). She won a scholarship for secondary education but, having completed her schooling, to her displeasure, found herself working with her parents in a secondhand clothes shop. Knowing she had a good voice, in 1907 she applied for an audition at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Having no classical repertoire she sang the simple songs she had learned as a child. Despite this lack of sophistication, her vocal potential was immediately apparent. The Director, Glazunov, and Natalya Iretskaya (the most important Russian singing tutor and herself a pupil of Pauline Viardot) accepted her and awarded her a scholarship for nine years' study.

The Mariinsky Theatre

In 1916 she made her debut, as Lisa in Tchaikovsky's ''The Queen of Spades'' the Mariinsky Theatre. She sang with the company for the next five years and performed many of the principal soprano parts of the Russian repertory as well as Sieglinde, Marguerite in ''Faust'', Elisabeth de Valois, and Aida. The revolution having broken out, she was ordered to join other singers on obligatory tours to factories and farms to entertain the workers and there met the bass Fyodor Chaliapin.

To Berlin

In 1921 she fled from Russia to Berlin where she was soon invited to sing. Success there brought a call from Diaghilev to join him in Paris to star in the premiere of Stravinsky's opera ''Mavra'' in 1922. Chaliapin then invited her to be principal soprano in the company he was forming to tour Western Europe and she sang with him in Paris.

To America

The impresario Rabinoff organised for her to tour America as star soloist with The Ukrainian Chorus and while there she made a successful solo debut at Carnegie Hall in New York. But, as a displaced Russian living abroad when appreciation of the Russian repertoire was minimal, Slobodskaya had difficulty finding a good manager. To augment her classical career, she created a parallel identity in vaudeville, singing operatic arias and good quality ballads under the pseudonym "Odali Careno". She remained in the USA for nearly seven years.

To England

In 1930 she was booked, as Odali Careno, for two weeks at the London Palladium. Always performing to her own exacting standards, she had a great success, was immediately re-engaged, and was later twice invited to star in Royal Command Performances before King George V and Queen Mary. She also re-established her classical career, appearing at the Lyceum with Chaliapin as Natasha in Alexander Dargomïzhsky's '' Rusalka''. In 1932, following her marriage to Captain Raymond Pelly, England became her permanent home.

Covent Garden debut

The same year (1932) she made her Covent Garden debut as Fevronia in a concert performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's ''Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh'', and as Venus in '' Tannhauser'' with Sir Thomas Beecham. She again sang Fevroniya, in Italian, at La Scala, Milan in 1933, and sang Palmyra in Thomas Beecham's production of Frederick Delius's ''Koanga'' at Covent Garden in 1935. In 1936 she took part in a Russian season at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires and sang Khivrya in Modest Moussorgsky's ''Fair at Sorochintsï'' at the Savoy and on an English tour in 1941 and subsequent years.

Work for the BBC

Throughout the 1930s she was much in demand by the BBC
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