It strikes me that the day might not go exactly according to plan when I arrive at Covent Garden at the appointed hour and discover that Covent Garden no longer exists.
Oh, we've all read about the refurbishment of London's Royal Opera House: but to be greeted by a huge empty shell, an enormous building site crawling with mechanical diggers and men in yellow hats talking into mobile phones, well, that really brings home the scale of the thing. This is not a question of a few new carpets and a lick of paint, folks; they have demolished the entire building, and are proceeding to build another one from the ground up.
In a daze of disbelief, I walk all the way around what used to be the block. The foyer, with its shabby grandeur? Gone. The stage door, with its dusty conviviality? Gone. The impossibly glamorous Russian diva I am supposed to interview, who has repeatedly been hailed as one of the brightest young voices and one of the most luminous young actresses on the international opera stage? Nowhere - not surprisingly - to be seen.
The expression on the face of the security man in the tiny office which clings forlornly to the side of the wreckage says it all: Covent Garden is not, at this moment in time, a suitable stomping-ground for a soprano. Nevertheless, a couple of hours and several phone calls later, I find myself sitting with Galina Gorchakova and a young music agent and fluent Russian-speaker called David in the almost alarmingly salubrious surroundings of the Palm Court at the Waldorf Hotel. As it turns out, the diva's temporary non-appearance was caused, not by the rebuilding work at the opera house, but by the conductor of Tchaikovsky's The En- chantress. Valery Gergiev had flown in from St Petersburg late the previous evening and demanded, at lamentably short notice, the presence of his principal singers for an unscheduled rehearsal ahead of their weekend concert performance of the piece at the Royal Festival Hall.
Everything about Galina Gorchakova suggests intelligence, pragmatism and a determination to serve the music. In person she is less intimidatingly glamorous than the photos on her CDs: the fur collar on her beige raincoat is fashionable, but not flamboyant; her gestures are expressive, but not excessive. Her English, alas, is limited, and so it is left to David to translate a torrent of vivid Russian. How he will translate the light that, from time to time, animates both her face and her speaking voice is anybody's guess.
We begin by exclaiming over the presence in London of The En- chantress, which is rarely performed, even in Russia. "The action takes place in Nizhni-Novgorod, a very beautiful place on the Volga," says Gorchakova. "It's a love tragedy with very luscious music - particularly in the first act, which has a lot of folkloric influences." Like Cherevichki? "Da," she replies at once, without waiting for a translation - and, fatally overestimating The Irish Times's intimacy with the more obscure operas of Tchaikovsky, launches into an enthusiastic comparison with Mazepa, which is, it seems, highly similar both musically, thematically and structurally.
Gorchakova herself grew up in Siberia - but put images of endless snow-filled wastes out of your head, for she declares herself "a child of the city", the city in question being Novosibirsk, which has a population of three million and a delightful opera house "built in the style of the Colosseum in Rome". As both her parents were opera singers, this opera house was where her childhood was largely spent. She always listened, always went to the theatre, even appeared in wordless roles as an actor on the stage. After graduating as a choral conductor, she began to study singing at 19, went to sing with the opera company in Sverdlovsk, otherwise known as Ekaterinburg, and was then invited to Leningrad, now St Petersburg, by Valery Gergiev. She now lives and works there, on contract to the Kirov Opera, aka the Marijinsky.
I am beginning to experience that dizzy feeling you get when you realise, half-way into War and Peace, that everyone has not one name but a minimum of three. Then the waiter arrives and we busy ourselves with cups of tea, slices of lemon and exquisite little sandwiches no more, I swear, than an inch square.
One of a generation of Russian singers who have benefited twice over from the political changes which began with perestroika, Gorchakova is grateful for the high musical standards of Soviet times, which ensured that even a town as remote as Novosibirsk had an opera house, a conservatoire whose graduates include - besides herself - the violinist Maxim Vengerov and a worldclass symphony orchestra. She is also aware that if old-style Soviet rule had continued, she would never have had a career in the West as "it was impossible to get out before 1991". In the spring of 1992, however, she didn't just get out, she fairly exploded on to the Western stage in a production of Prokofiev's occult opera The Fiery Angel at The Royal Opera House. It's hard, in retrospect, to tell which caused the greater uproar among the critics: Gorchakova's soaring soprano or the carefully-choreographed orgy of the final act, with its chorus of masturbating nuns.
Was she surprised, I can't resist asking, by the success of the opera once banned in the Soviet Union on the grounds that it was pornographic nonsense? "Yes," says her translator David, "yes, the subject is very specific, and it did surprise her that it would have such a success in the West. But she feels, you know, that roles choose her rather than that she chooses them. Maybe that's dangerous. Not many singers can do The Fiery Angel, but she felt that was her opportunity - that it was her fate to sing it. "
If it was fate which chose her roles, it certainly chose a handful of feisty women: Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, who grows from uncertain teenager to assured womanhood in the course of the opera; Tosca; Aida; Butterfly. "They are very strong, yes, but unlucky. Unhappy." And which role does she identify with most, as a woman? "Tatyana. She's honest, she has faith, she's an exemplary Russian woman. According to the Christian religion one must suffer all the blows of fate." Unlike Tosca, I suppose, who inflicts a few blows of her own when she stabs her tormentor to death in the third act. Another of those marvellous chuckles. "Well, maybe she wasn't right to do that, because of course in real life it's a sin to kill others - or, like Butterfly, to kill yourself. But on stage, for the public to see these acts, it's something . . . " She has used a word which sounds like "yarka" several times. "Bright," David decides.
This brightness is seen at its most luminous in verismo opera, which is, says Gorchakova, her great passion at the moment. Thus, when she comes to Dublin next Saturday to top the bill in a glittering gala concert to celebrate the 50th birthday of the National Symphony Orchestra, she will sing not Russian but Italian repertoire - arias from two of the great ve- rismo tearjerkers, Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur and Puccini's Manon Lescaut. And she's happy, it seems, not just to sing verismo but to talk about it as well. "She gives everything to the spectator when she's on stage," David translates. "Her passions envelop her and she gives everything. There are some singers who can control themselves at every moment, even in the moments of the highest passion - and maybe that's better, that they're always in control. "Such singers don't come in for so much criticism, because they always sing absolutely precisely - but she finds that a little cold. She would like to take lessons from that school of singer who always has things under control, but she can't. She'd rather be called an inexact singer than a cold one. Is she talking rubbish, she says to ask you . . . "
We all laugh at the outlandish suggestion that a conversation between two complete strangers, neither of whom can speak the other's language, might produce anything remotely resembling rubbish. And then she's saying how much she's looking forward to singing in Dublin, and happy that her arias won't form the whole of the concert "because when the singing is mixed with orchestral pieces, it will be an even brighter experience for the audience". There's that word again. Yarka. It might have been coined to describe Gorchakova herself.
Galina Gorchakova sings Puccini and Cilea arias at a gala concert at the National Concert Hall on February 14th in a programme which includes Grieg's Piano Concerto No 1 with soloist Ilya Itin, a specially-commissioned fanfare, Jubilee Fanfare, by John Kinsella, Gerard Victory's Olympic Festival overture and Respighi's Roman Festivals. The National Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by Kasper de Roo.