Two opera singers who had performed on stage in Barcelona were among 150 people who died on a Germanwings flight which crashed in the southern Alps on Tuesday. Oleg Bryjak, 54 and Maria Radner, 34, had performed in Richard Wagner’s Siegfried at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu on a series of dates that ended on Monday.
An opera house in Düsseldorf said Bryjak, who was a bass baritone, was one of the 150 people onboard the plane that crashed in the French Alps.
“We have lost a great performer and a great person in Oleg Bryjak. We are stunned,” Christoph Meyer, director of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, said.
The Gran Teatre del Liceu confirmed that Radner, along with her husband and baby, was among the dead. Bryjak had just performed as the character Alberich in Siegfried while Radner, who was an alto, played the role of Erda.
Bryjak was born in Kazakhstan when it was part of the former Soviet Union and had performed on opera stages including those in Paris, Zurich, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Sao Paolo and Tokyo, according to his website. His repertoire was said to include more than 30 operas.
A biography on her management company’s website says Radner, who was born in Düsseldorf in Germany, made her debut in January 2012 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She subsequently performed in Buenos Aires, Bonn, Rome, Geneva and Milan as well as the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in London. She featured in Wagner’s Das Rheinhold, which was on BBC radio in 2012.
The management of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, where the two singers had finished their run of performances the night before the flight, said on their official Twitter account: “Liceu Barcelona Opera House deeply mourns the death of Oleg Bryjak and Maria Radner.”
Tributes were paid to Bryjak and Radner from various corners of the music world. The violinist Karina Canellakis, assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, also paid tribute on Twitter. “My heart goes out to her friends and family. And all those lost today. Devastating,” she said.
Alexander Neef, general director of the Canadian Opera Company, said Radner had been expected to sing there in the next season. “Our deepest sympathies to family, friends & colleagues of Maria Radner, Oleg Bryjak & all who lost loved ones today,” he wrote.