Vladimir Galouzine is now regarded as one of the leading tenors of our time and appears with the most prominent opera theatres and symphony orchestras. He was born on 11 June 1956 in the town of Rubtsovsk in the Altay region of Russia. From his earliest years he loved to perform and organise shows, although the nearest opera house was in Novosibirsk, about five hundred kilometres away, and operas were seldom shown on television. Having completed his school education and wanting to become a popular singer, he entered a college in Barnaul, which, however, trained managers for village clubs. Without finishing the course, he joined the army, serving in the Novosibirsk song and dance ensemble. On one occasion, the ensemble, instead of going on leave, was taken to Novosibirsk Opera House as a ‘punishment’. Yet this first experience of opera—Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov—impressed him very deeply and defined his future destiny. He fell in love with opera and learned all of Chaliapin’s rôles, attempting to sing as a bass. Galouzine entered Novosibirsk Conservatory, but his studies there did not proceed smoothly. Taught to sing as a baritone, he kept trying to prove that he was a tenor. His tutors considered that he lacked the qualities to become a professional singer and he had difficulty finishing the conservatory course. He then entered the Novosibirsk Musical Comedy Theatre and worked diligently (sometimes performing twice daily in different productions) but never abandoned his ambition to become an opera singer, studying new rôles on his own. Through eight years working in musical comedy he gained important acting and stage-craft skills. In 1988 he began to sing in the Novosibirsk Opera House, working there for about a year before leaving for St Petersburg where he acted in Yuriy Alexandrov’s Chamber Music Theatre (now the St Petersburg Opera Theatre). Shortly afterwards, he was invited to sing Otello at the Mariinsky Theatre. This was his entry onto the world stage. In the mid-1990s he migrated to Belgium and began to receive invitations to sing in the world’s leading opera houses. He is considered to be the finest interpreters of the rôle of Hermann in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades and one of today’s best Otellos. A close friend of Valery Gergiev, Vladimir Galouzine remains a member of the Mariinsky Theatre with which he has participated in many tours throughout the world and has interpreted most leading tenor rôles of the Russian and Italian repertoire including Hermann (The Queen of Spades), The Pretender (Boris Godunov), Andrey Khovansky (Khovashchina), Grishka Kuterma and Prince Vsevolod (The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and Maiden Fevronia), Vladimir Igorevich (Prince Igor), Alexey (The Gambler), Sergey (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk), Calaf (Turandot), Radames (Aida), Pinkerton (Madama Butterfly) and Cavaradossi (Tosca), as well as the title rôles in Otello, Sadko and Don Carlos. He also performs for many of the most famous opera houses worldwide, including Opera Bastille, Paris, Lyric Opera, Chicago, Metropolitan Opera, New York, La Scala, Milan and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. Vladimir Galouzine is the subject of a biography written by Dr Natalia Bulgakova, which is available from the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and Mariinsky Theatre.