Vitas

After being rejected from a musical college in his native Odesa, his family did not have the money to send him to a private institution.[9] As a result, Vitas, already using the name as a pseudonym, started performing at night clubs.[15][16] He initially started his career as a Michael Jackson tribute act, but also performed parodies and his own songs. He also made money, amongst others, by selling leftover bread from stores on the street as well as offering services as a photographer.[17] At night clubs, he had acts involving dancing, singing, comedy and magic tricks, including spoon bending.[17] He worked as an actor in an experimental theatre. He applied to perform with his own songs at the 1997 edition of Chervona ruta festival, but was rejected as his repertoire lacked songs in Ukrainian.[18] In 1999, Odesan regional television station Elan shot a music video for his song "Opera #1", which they recorded in Odesa.[19]

During one of his night club performances, where he performed "Opera #2", he was spotted by a Russian producer, who recommended Vitas going to Moscow. Vitas had seriously considering going to Moscow for a while around 1998-1999.[17] During a play at the experimental theatre, he was spotted by producer Sergey Pudovkin, whom he gifted a cassette of his song. A week later, Vitas and his girlfriend Svetlana left Odesa.[18]

With Pudovkin, Vitas starting working on his debut for the Russian audience. In order to make money and sustain himself and his girlfriend, he started working for youth channel TV-6.[17] They recorded a music video for "Opera #2", in which Vitas portrayed an eccentric lonely man with fish gills who lives in a bathtub with jars of fish and plays the accordion naked. The music video premiered in December 2000 and received wide public attention. Vitas started performing the song with artificial gills, which let the Russian media compare him to Ichthyander, a character in the novel Amphibian Man.[20]

On February 27, 2001, Vitas premiered his solo concert show "Opera #...", in an abridged form, at the "Russia" Concert Hall in Moscow. Performed as a teaser for the first leg of his "Philosophy of Miracle" tour, the show was filmed by TV-6 and later broadcast as part of the music program "Наша музыка". Although not well documented, official sources recall that the tour began on April 7, 2001, presumably in Naro-Fominsk.[21] Other sources confirm that the tour had already started by March 2001.[22] During that first tour, Vitas performed not only in concert halls, but also on TV shows, festivals,[23] stadiums,[24] casino halls and nightclubs. In March 2002, Vitas made his first tour in the United States of America.[25]

On March 29, 2002, Vitas premiered the second leg of his "Philosophy of Miracle" concert tour with a concert at the State Kremlin Palace in Moscow.[26] The concert was filmed by Channel One Russia and later released on DVD.

In late 2002, Vitas received an invitation from Lucio Dalla, the composer of "Caruso", to perform this song together with him at the "Sanremo in Moscow" concert in the State Kremlin Palace on November 23, 2002.[27] Mr. Dalla then invited Vitas to come to Rome to take part in the rehearsals of Toska, a modern version of Puccini's opera.

In dedication to his mother who died in 2001, Vitas released two albums: "Mama" and "The Songs of My Mother".[28] The latter included classic Soviet songs which were the favourite of Vitas' late mother. During the process of recording the album, Vitas befriended Soviet and Russian composer Alexandra Pakhmutova,[20] who featured in his music video for her song "The Bird of Happiness".[29]

On October 21, 2003, Vitas ended his first concert tour "Philosophy of Miracle" with its last gig in Kaliningrad.

On November 1, 2003, Vitas presented his second concert tour with the show "The Songs of My Mother" in the "Russia" Concert Hall in Moscow. Compared to the flamboyant nature of his previous Philosophy of Miracle tour, The Songs of My Mother was more conservative, drawing on classic Russian songs. From 2004 to 2006, Vitas' management, the "Pudovkin" Production Center continued "The Songs of My Mother" tour in Russia and the United States, Germany, Kazakhstan, Israel and the Baltic states.[3]

In addition to his singing career, Vitas also starred in a murder mystery television series called "Сволочь ненаглядная" ("Beloved Scoundrel"), in which he played a pop singer with an unusually high voice.[30] He also starred in a comedy called Crazy Day.[31]

In June 2006, Vitas was invited by China Central Television to take part in a grand event entitled The Year of Russia in China in Beijing. Vitas performed two songs, "The Star" and "Opera #2" during the event, marking the beginning of his popularity in China.

Vitas' Return Home tour, beginning in 2006, had a conservative atmosphere similar to the Songs of My Mother tour. The concert performed in Saint Petersburg on 4 March 2007 was later released on DVD on Vitas' website, as well as officially in some countries, albeit with many songs removed. The full concert in Moscow was later released on DVD.

In October 2007, Vitas was signed with now-defunct American label Gemini Sun Records. Gemini Sun released the Audio Visual Connect Series Vitas compilation CD + DVD set featuring eight music videos with the corresponding songs also on audio CD, in addition to a bonus audio track.[32] In 2008, Vitas also released "Light of A New Day", a 40-minute track of non-lyrical vocalization and instrumentation. The song is available as a free download on his website.

The Sleepless Night tour included concerts in China and more elaborate presentations than the more conservative Return Home program. Vitas performed his Return Home concert in Bucharest, Romania on 25 February 2009. The concert was broadcast on the Romanian TVR2 and TVRi television networks, achieving their highest ratings in twelve months.[33] A benefit concert, with Vitas performing "The Star", was held on 12 May 2009 in Sichuan province in memory of the victims of the previous year's earthquake there; a song known as "Mommy and Son" was released in late October 2009 in remembrance of the victims. It was the very first title track of the Mommy and Son album (released 1 September 2011), which included new songs, such as "C'est La Vie" (French for "Such is life"), "Once More", "Let the Father Teach!", "Young Rook" and others.[4]

Vitas played the role of Gude in the Chinese film Mulan, which premiered in Beijing on 16 November 2009.[34] He recorded music for the film's soundtrack.[3]

In early 2011, Vitas performed a series of seven Sleepless Night concerts in New York City, Toronto, Chicago, Miami, Vancouver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Later that year, he played the role of Bolshevik Comintern official Grigori Voitinsky in the Chinese propaganda film The Founding of a Party. He also starred with Huang Shengyi in the musical A Night to Be a Star. In March 2011, Vitas' concert tour "Mommy and Son" started in several cities of Russia. His large-scale concert at the Palace of Arts "Ukraina" in Kyiv in March 2012 was broadcast in Ukraine's main TV channels and later released in DVD. In 2013 he brought the tour to Germany, performing in several cities.

In 2012, Vitas was a guest star on several Russian talk shows, including Let Them Talk, where he was interviewed for the first time on Russian television after hiding himself from the press for about a decade.[35]

Vitas in 2015.

In June 2015, Vitas' unusual music video for his 2001 song "The 7th Element", which featured him as a kind of humanoid alien performing on the 2001 edition of Little Blue Light, became popular after it was posted on Reddit.[36] It sparked memes throughout the internet, where it received a considerable amount of parodies.[37] It reached its peak search on Google in 2017 when the meme became popular in Brazil as Facebook pages such as South America Memes were responsible for memes using footage from his performance of the song at the Songs of My Mother tour. On 5 October, he thanked the pages for his popularity.[38]

In 2019, Vitas released his fifteenth album Bit Bombit. He celebrated his 20th anniversary as an artist starting with a new concert tour in April 2019 in Moscow, while appearing at Evening Urgant on the day of his 40th birthday.[39] He collaborated with Australian musician and DJ Timmy Trumpet on the song "The King" and performed with him at the Belgian rave festival Tomorrowland.[40] In August 2020, Vitas' 20th anniversary EP OPERA20 was released in China.[41] The album contained songs in English, Russian, and Chinese, as well as a collaboration with Chinese singer Elvis Wang. 1,000 limited edition vinyl copies were issued.[42]

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Vitas' touring abroad stopped and for a while, he solely performed in Russia. Since March 2022, he has withdrawn from performing publicly and focused mostly on his family.[43]

• Aleksandr Gruzdev – guitar, saxophone, backing vocals (2001–present)
• Maxim Musatov – keyboards, backing vocals (2019–present)
• Aleksandr Illin – bass guitar, backing vocals (2016–present)
• Yaroslav Andreev – drums (2012–present)

• [unknown] – guitar, backing vocals (2014–2015)
• Vasiliy Musatov – keyboards (2004–2019)
• Ilya "G.IL.V" Grebenyuk – keyboards (2001–2003)
• Aleksey Rostov – keyboards (2003)
• Andrey Artemov – bass guitar, backing vocals (2007–2015)
• Rashit Kyamov – bass guitar, backing vocals (2001–2007, 2015–2016)
• Rushan Harryasov – drums (2001–2012)