Ekaterina Sabinina

Ekaterina Sabinina, born Sobakina, was a Russian mezzo-soprano and contralto who sang the Innkeeper at the 1928 Leningrad premiere of the original 1869 Boris Godunov. She studied singing in St Petersburg and Moscow, spent 1914 to 1919 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, and then moved north, dividing the 1920s between the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet and the smaller Leningrad companies. Chaliapin was among her partners. Character parts in the new Soviet repertory came her way, the old woman in Shostakovich's The Nose among them, and she was still singing at Sverdlovsk in 1936.