I am in front of the door of the Lviv conservatory because, after a decade in the Dudaryk choir, Wassyl, 17 years old, sure of wanting to become a soloist, really wanted to join. However, despite the rarity of his voice, it was not easy. I am kindly received by the couple of pianists and teachers Oksana Rapita and Myroslav Dragan accompanied by the vice-rector and conductor Bohdan Dashak. All three are a little older than Wassyl, but they frequented the same artistic circles. Like archaeologists hunched over an excavation site – except that we are around a plywood table and glasses of water on placemats – they try with sincerity to explain the Wassyl Slipak case to me. There, there was a problem, a hindrance: his countertenor range. Oksana Rapita gets started.
- No one sang like this either in Lviv or in Kyiv. At the conservatory, the teachers were afraid, they didn’t know how to handle it. For each voice, you know, there is a repertoire, a program, a development path. For him, he had to be looked for. What they ended up doing by finding very old scores.
