Araksia Davtyan

Araksia Davtyan was a Soviet and Armenian opera singer (soprano). She was born on 22 April 1949 in Kalacha, Noyemberyan District, and died on 28 July 2010 in Moscow. In 2004 she was awarded the title of People's Artist of the Republic of Armenia.

She was born into an ordinary family: her father was a military pilot and her mother was a medical worker. After her father's retirement, the family returned from Russia to Yerevan. There she entered the Saradzhev Music School as a piano student, where the school's director, the singer Melania Cholakhyan, discovered her remarkable vocal abilities and began to work with her.

After graduating from the Yerevan Conservatory in 1975 in the class of R. I. Gulabyan, Davtyan worked as an accompanist-illustrator at the conservatory. From 1980 to 1986 she was a soloist of the conservatory's Opera Studio, and from 1986 to 1992 she was a soloist of the symphony orchestra of Armenian State Television and Radio.

In 1984, after winning the Viotti Competition in Vercelli, she made her Bolshoi Theatre debut as Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata. Another major success came with a concert tour in the United States and across European countries with the Moscow Virtuosi orchestra under Vladimir Spivakov. She performed in more than 120 major concert halls around the world, including Carnegie Hall in New York, Salle Gaveau in Paris, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and halls in Tokyo, and collaborated with conductors and singers such as Riccardo Chailly, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Klaus Peter Flor, Elena Obraztsova, and Tamara Sinyavskaya.

Davtyan taught vocal performance at the Komitas Yerevan State Conservatory and became a professor there in 1997. She also worked in Moscow until the end of her life. Among her students were Mikael Babajanyan, Rustam Yavaev, Anna Mailyan, Luzine Azaryan, and Lolitta Semenina.

She was also a supporter of the Armenian opposition movement and fought for the freedom of political prisoners. She was buried in the Yerevan City Pantheon. Her broad repertoire included works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Giovanni Pergolesi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Strauss, Mikhail Glinka, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich. She also appeared in Rustam Khamdamov's surrealist film Vocal Parallels in 2005. Her honors included the title Honored Artist of the Armenian SSR in 1987, third prize at the Glinka All-Union Vocalists Competition in Tallinn in 1979, and a prize at the Viotti International Competition of Music and Dance in Vercelli in 1984.

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