olegbryjak.com
Bass-baritone Oleg Bryjak.
PARSIPPANY, N.J. – Ukrainian opera singer Oleg Bryjak was among the 144 passengers and six crew members who died when Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 crashed in the south of France on March 24 during a morning flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, Germany.
Among those killed aboard the Airbus A320 were two babies traveling with their mothers and 16 schoolchildren on their way home from a nine-day exchange trip to Spain. The dead included Germans, Spaniards, Australians, Americans, Japanese, British and passengers of other nationalities.
Mr. Bryjak, a bass-baritone, had just completed performances in Barcelona in the opera “Siegfried” by Richard Wagner. He performed along with the German-born contralto Maria Radner, 33, who was on the doomed flight with her baby and husband.
Mr. Bryjak (pronounced Bryzhak), 54, was of Ukrainian descent but was born in Kazakhstan in 1960. He had been with the German Opera on the Rhine in Dusselfdorf since 1996 and had lived in Germany since 1991. Mr. Bryjak was also a protodeacon of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Krefeld, northwest of Dusseldorf.
His father was a Ukrainian who at the age of 15 was sent to Germany as a forced laborer during World War II. After the war, considered an “enemy of the people” and a “traitor,” he was sent by the Soviets to serve 25 years in the gulag in Kazakhstan.
“It was in that camp, in the settlement, where I was born,” Oleg Bryjak told Deutsche Welle in a 2014 interview, adding that the settlement was populated by the families of political prisoners who were Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Georgian, Latvian and Kazakh.
He completed the Karanganda Music School in 1979, studying bayan; and in 1984 graduated from the Alma-Ata Conservatory, majoring in voice. In 1986-1989 he was a soloist with opera theaters in Chelyabinsk, Russia, and Lviv.
Known as a Wagnerian singer, Mr. Bryjak performed on opera stages around the globe, including Paris, Zurich, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Sao Paolo and Tokyo. “We have lost a great artist and a great man … We are shocked,” said Christoph Meyer, general director of the Dusseldorf opera house, announcing Mr. Bryjak’s death.
Sources: zaxid.net, Daily Mail, Agence France-Presse, Deutsche Welle.