Irina Vashchenko has already appeared at the Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet Theatre as Liza, the opera’s leading female role, in 2023. In 2024, she returned to the same stage as Tosca in Puccini’s eponymous opera, performing within the Parade of Stars in Opera. Slovtsov festival. Now, in 2025, Irina is once again in Krasnoyarsk, returning to the role of Liza in Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece.

 

Since 2000, Irina Vashchenko has been a soloist with the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre. As a guest vocalist, she has also collaborated with the Mariinsky Theatre and a number of European opera houses. Her repertoire includes leading soprano roles in operas by Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Verdi, Puccini, Offenbach, and others. She performed the role of Gertrude in the world premiere of Vladimir Kobekin’s Hamlet (a Danish [Russian] Comedy) and has toured extensively with the Music Theatre across the USA, South Korea, Estonia, Latvia, Israel, Greece, and the Netherlands.

 

In The Queen of Spades, Rauf Timergazin will perform the part of Count Tomsky. The young baritone singer has performed on the Krasnoyarsk stage several times before, remembered by audiences for his portrayals of Masetto in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Doctor Ebn-Hakia in Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, Mizgir in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden, and Gryaznoy in The Tsar’s Bride.

 

A graduate of the Rostropovich Orenburg State Institute of Arts, Rauf Timergazin joined the Bolshoi Theatre’s opera company in 2016, making his debut in Dargomyzhsky’s The Stone Guest. From 2018 to 2021, he was a member of the Bolshoi’s Young Artists Opera Programme, and from 2022 to 2025, a soloist at the Perm Opera House. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.