Tsesevych, Platon

Tsesevych, Platon [Цесевич, Платон; Cesevyč], b 7 December 1879 in Niahnevichy, Minsk gubernia, Belarus, d 30 November 1958 in Moscow. Opera singer (bass); father of Volodymyr Tsesevych. He worked in the theater troupes of Dmytro Haidamaka and Onysym Suslov and studied singing under Y. Liubin in Saint Petersburg (1902–4), before his debut at the Kharkiv Opera (1904). He sang with the Muzychna Drama theater in Kyiv, the Kharkiv Theater of Opera and Ballet, the Kyiv Theater of Opera and Ballet, and the Odesa Opera and Ballet Theater; at the Bolshoi and the Zimin operas in Moscow; and in France and Italy (1925–6 and 1932). In 1933–48 he concertized throughout the USSR. His operatic roles included the name-parts in Mykola Lysenko's Taras Bulba and Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, Mephistopheles in Charles Gounod's Faust, and Basilio in Gioachino Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Ivan Kozlovsky was his pupil.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lysenko, I. (ed.) Platon Tsesevych: Spohady i materiialy (Zhytomyr 2014)

[This article originally was updated in 2014.]