Music: Asmik Grigorian: In Armenia, girls think the best thing to do is marry

An award-winning opera singer has said that she wants to empower women in the former Soviet Union to aspire to a life beyond being a wife or mother.

Asmik Grigorian, a Lithuanian soprano with strong family ties to Armenia, said that countries such as her ancestral home must make “many changes” to raise the ambitions of young women and girls.

Grigorian said that she often self-censored in interviews conducted in Armenia, where her father, the opera singer Gegham Grigorian, was born.

"We are in Europe where women have so many rights," she said. "If I was to give this interview in Armenia of course I would talk differently because in this country [achieving equality] is a problem that must be solved.

"In Armenia there are still lots of changes needed. Seventeen-year-old girls and women still think that the only thing they can do best in their lives is to marry and be a good mother. They have no thoughts that they can be educated. In that country it is hard to talk as a woman with the same power [as men].

"It is very important for me to show that to be a mother, to be a woman and to be a great, strong person in your profession, are all equal."

Her father, a tenor who died three years ago, was born in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, in 1951. In the 1970s he was added to the Soviet authorities' "artists list" and banned from leaving the Soviet Union for eight years.

He was eventually granted political asylum while living in a refugee centre and settled in Vilnius, Lithuania, where his daughter was raised. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 he enjoyed a successful international career. Two years later he made his Covent Garden debut starring in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, the same opera in which his daughter made her first Edinburgh International Festival appearance last night.

Grigorian, 38, has received critical acclaim, including winning young female singer of the year at the International Opera Awards in 2016. In April she was named the awards' female singer of the year and has twice received the Golden Stage Cross, Lithuania's most prestigious singing prize.

She lives in Salzburg, Austria, with her husband, the Russian theatre director Vasily Barchatov, and her two children.

Speaking at the opening of Eugene Onegin, she described growing up in a Catholic country where sacrifice was expected of people.

"I always do what I love to do and if I don't love it, I don't do it," she said. "Sacrificing is not good. Everything I do, I do with happiness.

"Where I am now, we have partnerships and the men take care of the families a lot. I am a strong person. If something makes me unhappy or I think my husband should be caring more for my child I will sit down and say, 'Darling, let's talk about it and do things better.'

"I respect myself as a strong, sensitive woman. There are things that we could do, men could never do. I can't be a better ballerina than the ballerina. But I can be a better singer. Men and women were made to be different."

Eugene Onegin runs until tomorrow, August 17, at Festival Theatre. Box office: 0131 529 6000