Rudenko, Bela

Rudenko, Bela [Руденко, Бела], b 18 August 1933 in Bokovo-Antratsyt, now in Luhansk oblast, d 13 October 2021 in Moscow. Opera singer (lyric soprano). A graduate of the Odesa Conservatory (1956), she studied singing under Olha Blahovydova. She was a soloist with the Odesa Opera and Ballet Theater (1955–6), the Kyiv Theater of Opera and Ballet (1956–73), and, from 1973, the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. In 1957 she won the gold medal at the Toulouse International Vocal Competition. Her operatic roles included Liudmila in Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Liudmila, Marfa in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride, Yaryna in Heorhii Maiboroda’s Maryna and the Serf-girl in his The Arsenal, Gilda in Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto and Violetta in his La Traviata, Rosina in Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Venus in Mykola Lysenko’s Aeneas. She toured abroad and from 1977 taught singing at the Moscow Conservatory. Biographies of Rudenko have been written by Valentyn Tymofieiev and T. Shvachko (1982).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]