Deborah Pantofel-Nechetskaya
Deborah Yakovlevna Pantofel-Nechetskaya was a Soviet opera singer, coloratura soprano, pianist, and music educator. She was born on 30 December 1904 (12 January 1905, New Style) in Omsk into a Jewish family. Her father, Yakov Abramovich Pantofel, was an engraver, and her mother was Sofia Petrovna.
She studied at a gymnasium and music school, then at the Omsk music technical school, where she trained in singing and piano until 1926. In 1929 she undertook a concert tour of Siberia and married David Nechetsky. In 1931 she entered the Rimsky-Korsakov Leningrad Conservatory without an entrance competition, studying singing with Yelena Bronskaya; she graduated in 1934. She also worked as a pianist at a factory club.
From 1934 she was a soloist at Omsk Radio, and in 1934–1935 she worked for Novosibirsk Radio and the Musical Comedy Theatre. She was a soloist of the Sverdlovsk Opera and Ballet Theatre from 1936 to 1939. In December 1939 she won first prize at the First All-Union Competition of Variety Performers.
Pantofel-Nechetskaya was a soloist of the Moscow State Philharmonic from 1940 to 1960. She made her Bolshoi Theatre debut in 1941 and appeared there periodically through 1945. Until the mid-1960s, she gave solo recitals in many cities of the Soviet Union and toured Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Iran. Her concert repertoire included more than 700 works by Russian, Soviet, and Western European composers, as well as folk songs from different countries.
Her operatic roles included Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville, Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata, Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto, Juliette in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, and Lakmé in Delibes's Lakmé. Reinhold Glière dedicated his 1943 Concerto for Coloratura Soprano and Orchestra to her. She also performed the off-screen vocal numbers, with music by Dmitry Kabalevsky, in the 1941 film Anton Ivanovich Is Angry.
She taught at the Institute of Theatre and Satire, was a teacher at the Lunacharsky State Institute of Theatre Arts from 1960 to 1965, and served as an associate professor at the Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory from 1965 until her death. She received the title Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1945, the Stalin Prize of the second degree in 1946 for her concert performance activity, and the Order of Honour in 1994. She died in Moscow on 16 February 1998 and was buried at Vostryakovskoye Cemetery.