The Party’s Not Over for Kirov Singer : Music: For soprano Galina Gorchakova, the end of communism has meant more opportunities. She sings ‘Madama Butterfly’ beginning tonight at the Music Center.

The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 may have pitched Russia and the Soviet republics immeasurably into turmoil, but it helped a chosen few artists such as soprano Galina Gorchakova launch international careers.

“I was in exactly the right place at the right time after all that happened,” Gorchakova said last week in her dressing room at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. She will sing the title role of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” for the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, opening tonight.

“Before, during communism, if you had some relatives in the Party, you got the parts,” she said, speaking through a translator. “I didn’t have any relatives in the Party. Definitely, I wouldn’t have gotten to go and perform in America or in Italy, as I have done. Right now, it’s all up to the artists. If I want to go and perform, I just go.”

A principal artist with the Kirov Opera in St. Petersburg, Gorchakova first gained international acclaim when she sang Renata in Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel” with the Kirov at Covent Garden in London and later, again with the Kirov, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1992.

Earlier this month, she appeared in the weeklong Rimsky-Korsakov festival at the Kirov and also sang Cio-Cio San at the Houston Grand Opera.

“Before Gorbachev, it was the government that sponsored all the theaters--the opera, the musicians and artists,” she said.

“Right now, we have to support ourselves. It’s probably harder that way, but we’re doing it by getting money from some private sponsors--like corporations or banks. In the Kirov Theater, we (also) have people who are like your founders, like the Founders Circle here.”

Or, if they have the talent like her, they go abroad to sing and earn hard currency. Gorchakova said she is paid in rubles at the Kirov.

“It’s probably harder, in a way,” she agreed, “but on the other hand, the musical director of the Kirov Theater, Valery Gergiev, has a lot of connections in different countries.”

Gorchakova has traveled a long way from her native Siberian city of Novosibirsk, about 1,700 miles from Moscow. “I grew up in Siberia, but in the cultural center of Siberia,” she stressed. “There is a big opera house there.”

That was where she saw her first Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s “Yevgeny Onegin,” which decided her future. “And that was my first part at the Kirov,” she said.

“My mother never dreamed of my being a big opera star. She just wanted me to sing in an opera house. That was the goal. But, yes, I always wanted to be an opera singer.”

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While studying at the Novosibirsk Conservatory, she met her husband, Nikolai Mikhalski, a bass. The two have a 7-year-old son, Andrei, who takes piano lessons and likes opera “a lot.” Andrei right now is in school at home, St. Petersburg, and Nikolai is singing in a new production there. “So I’m traveling by myself.”

In addition to the great Russian roles, she also learned Italian operas--in Italian, she was careful to note. “Italian, definitely. The first time I sang ‘Butterfly’ in Italian was at the Kirov Theater, and then I came to Houston and sang it.”

Her vocal models, she said, included Maria Callas, Renata Scotto and, she added with a laugh, the great Russian bass Chaliapin.

What about Galina Vishnevskaya, who as of 1978 was a non-person in the Soviet Union? (Vishnevskaya and her husband, cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, were stripped of Soviet citizenship and denounced as “ideological renegades” a year after they settled in the United States in 1977. Both had their citizenship restored in 1990 during the era of perestroika.)

“I heard her only four years ago,” Gorchakova said, “because until then it was hard to get her recordings. I heard her in a recording of Shostakovich’s ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,’ and I liked it a lot.”

But by then it was too late for Vishnevskaya to serve as a role model.

Besides, at that point, she felt ready for the rigors of a professional career “because I knew it already. It’s the same everywhere, the opera life, whether in Los Angeles or St. Petersburg or Novosibirsk. And I was ready, because I was grown up.”

Still, one thing that’s different in the West, she acknowledged, is the heavier emphasis on stage direction.

“In the Kirov, the main thing is still the music,” she said. “Everything is working just for the music. And it should be a nice alliance. It shouldn’t be just for the stage director, the whole production.”

She said she is happy with Christopher Harlan, who inherited direction of this production from Ian Judge. “I like directors who have good taste,” she said.

Judge staged the premiere production for the Music Center Opera in 1991. Maria Ewing sang the title role then, interpreting it darkly right from the start. “That was her vision, but not mine,” Gorchakova said. “Mine is more conventional.”

She added: “The acting part is hard. Tosca can be done in different ways, but Butterfly should be definitely Japanese. I’ve tried everything. I do my best. But I’m sorry I’m not small.”

The vocal demands of the role, however, hold no terrors for her. She plans to take the top D-flat at the end of the entrance aria, for instance, unlike Ewing and others who opt for the lower alternative.

“I will sing all the high notes,” Gorchakova said firmly.