Russia
David Nice
Over the past two Saturdays, Vladimir Jurowski and a London Philharmonic on top form have given us a mini-festival of great scores for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The hallucinogenic vision of ancient Greece in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé last week was succeeded yesterday evening by the fresh-as-poster-paint colours of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and excerpts from Prokofiev’s Chout (The Buffoon), a longer score in the Petrushka mould which has suffered disproportionate neglect (though not from the LPO – both Alexander Lazarev and Jurowski have conducted the complete ballet). Both works, especially in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Leviathan is an urgent film about corruption in Putin’s Russia and you should make sure you see it. The story has an elemental simplicity: the remorseless state, in collusion with the church, sets out to crush the blameless individual citizen with the brutal use of the police and the courts. It is remarkably beautiful to look at, and acted with valiant truthfulness (and a lake of vodka). Perhaps the Academy’s voters missed a geopolitical trick in not anointing Andrei Zvyagintsev as this year’s best foreign film.Don’t expect to have a good time: this Russia has no truck with happy endings. For Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russia’s national gallery, the Tretyakov, bears the name of its founder Pavel Tretyakov, the 19th-century merchant who bequeathed his huge collection of Russian art to the city of Moscow in 1892. His bust stands proudly overseeing the entrance to the gallery’s old building, a fine, purpose-built example of early Russian 20th-century architecture.But the Tretyakov has a new wing, dating from the mid-1980s and less architecturally august, that is far less known (and much less visited), which houses its collection of Russian and Soviet art of the 20th century. If any figure deserved a memorial Read more ...
fisun.guner
As Shakespeare is to these native isles, so Pushkin is to Russia. And Eugene Onegin, Alexander Puskin’s enduring verse novel first published in serial form in 1825, is the most honoured and beloved of all Russian classics. Outside Russia, the story is, of course, most familiar to us through Tchaikovsky’s great opera. We also have John Cranko’s 1965 ballet, set to other music by Tchaikovsky, a production of which is currently selling out at the Royal Opera House. Now a rare spoken-word adaptation is setting the bar. Presented in two acts, and running at nearly three and a half hours, it Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A memorial concert to a busy man. Alexander Ivashkin, who died last January, was a cellist, a scholar, a teacher, an authority on Russian music, and much else besides. This evening’s concert faced up to the daunting challenge of commemorating the many diverse aspects of Ivashkin’s career. The results were predictably wide-ranging, yet always coherent, and an impressive focus was brought to this mixed but never eclectic programme.Credit, then, to Danny Driver. The concert was organised by the University of Goldsmiths, where Ivashkin was Professor of Music, and where Driver has succeeded him as Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Russian saxophonist Zhenya Strigalev, whose band of stars Smiling Organizm has now released its second album, cuts a rather romantic figure in jazz, hopping from continent to continent, his saxophone as calling card. Along the way, he has accumulated an outstanding band of mainly American players, including trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Eric Harland, though there’s still a quirky, rootless individualism about much of this album that sounds like a band whose origins cross oceans. Where Strigalev’s compositions really stand out is in the blending of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
No one could have known it would be one of his final screen appearances – there’s another still to come in a further installment of Hunger Games – but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man proved, with hindsight, a fitting farewell. This was Hoffman living the part, as on-the-edge, largely off-the-radar Hamburg spymaster Gunter Bachman, whose life and professional energy seems fuelled by cigarettes and whisky.Adapted from John Le Carré’s 2008 novel, it can’t but help bring back memories of that writer’s other spy-supremos, though control – to appropriate the title Read more ...
David Nice
Of Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, who died 100 years ago aged 43, it was said at one time (by Rimsky-Korsakov) that he was “warped, a poser and opinionated”, at another (by Boris Pasternak) that he could seem “as tranquil and lucent as God resting from his labours on the seventh day”. Only Pasternak’s definition applies to the magnificence of Garrick Ohlsson, a lion couchant who can use his wings to fly into the sun when Scriabin so requires. After five sonatas and 10 pregnant miniatures, including three encores, he seemed as calm and genial as when he’d begun, grinning in genuine delight Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If the idea of the BBC putting together a “Super Rich” season came as a surprise in itself, the fact that wealthy Russians would be appearing in it can’t have shocked anyone, and Rich, Russian and Living in London duly got last night’s opening slot. Apparently “Moscow-on-the-Thames”, or “Londongrad” if you prefer it, has a lasting fascination with television producers that so far continues proportionate with the willingness of its subjects to open up their lives to outside scrutiny.We can only wonder at their motivations for doing so, whether they think it’s the televisual equivalent of a Read more ...
David Nice
All happy families are alike, Tolstoy declares at the start of Anna Karenina, but this adaptation of War and Peace stresses how the surviving Rostovs and Bolkonskys went through various hells to get to that enviable state. In this one respect consummate mover and shaper Timberlake Wertenbaker steals a march on her author. Isn’t there a feeling of flatness when we find Natasha and Pierre sunk in seemingly trivial domestic bliss towards the end of the novel? By having them, and the equally contented married couple of Princess Marya and Natasha’s brother Nikolay, recollect with anything but Read more ...
David Nice
How disorienting it is to find century-old works in the concert repertoire of which you can still say “I’ve never heard anything like it”. That must have been the reaction of most audience members last night to Tuscan-German composer Ferruccio Busoni’s 85-minute symphony-concerto for piano, orchestra and male voice choir, since only a few will have caught what classical anoraks tell me was its only other London performance in recent years, at the 1988 Proms.This misleadingly named Piano Concerto crowned a magnificent triptych of a concert programme centred around the Janus-headed year 1902, Read more ...
David Nice
If Brahms’s First Symphony has long been dubbed “Beethoven’s Tenth”, then the 23-year-old Rachmaninov’s First merits the label of “Tchaikovsky’s Seventh” (a genuine candidate for that title, incidentally, turns out to be a poor reconstruction from Tchaikovsky’s sketches by one Bogatryryev). Yet unlike the other near-contemporary works in last night’s programme, Szymanowski’s Concert Overture and Scriabin’s Piano Concerto, it has a disturbing individuality, a heavy heart that is truly worn “inside out”, as Vladimir Jurowski’s season-long Rachmaninov festival with his London Philharmonic Read more ...