Russia
Matt Wolf
"We all live here in peace and friendship," notes Telegin (David Ahmad), otherwise known as Waffles, early in Uncle Vanya, to which one is tempted to respond, "yeah, right."As casually bruising a play as I know, Chekhov's wounding yet also brutally funny masterwork exists to explode Telegin's remark across four acts, and adaptor-director Trevor Nunn's terrific in-the-round production for west London's Orange Tree Theatre sees all the characters in the round: you're aware of their dual ability to be fantasists one minute, ruthless about themselves the next.By way of example, barely has Astrov Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
The LSO’s apéritif hour “Half-Six Fixes” have an informality that usually works and sometimes doesn’t. But the first of this two-night run of Dmitri Shostakovich’s monstrous and terrifying Fourth Symphony was unforgettable. Panels on the auditorium walls greeted the audience with a portrait of the composer and his famous note: “The authorities tried everything they knew to get me to repent… But I refused. Instead of repenting, I wrote my Fourth Symphony”.When Simon Rattle took to the podium he explained, for anyone who did not already know, the story behind them: pocket Shostakovich in 20 Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
After a frozen week, the sensual languor of Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été promised warm respite at the Wigmore Hall – especially when delivered by house favourite Christian Gerhaher and his peerless pianist, Gerold Huber.Yet the Bavarian baritone saved that cycle for the end of a rainbow-hued recital that spanned a vast array of modes and moods: four composers, three languages (French, Russian and Czech, but no German), and solo interludes in which Huber played Chopin mazurkas and even the mighty Ballade No. 4 in F minor. The pair delivered more than generous measures, over a spectrum of styles Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The movies haven’t been kind to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Nutcracker Suite was a highlight of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) perhaps, but the 1969 Soviet biopic directed by Igor Talankin was tedious and Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers, released two years later, worse than that.Tchaikovsky’s Wife, written and directed by the talented Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, tells the story of Antonina Miliukova, who married Tchaikovsky in 1877 and then went mad because she couldn’t reconcile herself to the composer’s homosexuality.It should have been obvious to the smitten Miliukova (Alyona Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It takes a brave or a foolhardy person to walk the streets wearing almost nothing but barbed wire and platform shoes, especially when the occasion is an anti-war demo in Moscow and the penalty for joining the march is up to 15 years in jail.It’s February 2022, Russia has invaded Ukraine and large numbers of protestors are chanting “No to War”; then as the police start pouncing, the chant switches to “shame on you”. Gena Marvin (whose pronoun is she) is among those bundled into a police van; the barbed wire outfit made her an obvious target.It’s not the first time the androgynous, LGBTQ+ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
That's What Remained is the aural equivalent of being pulled into a maelstrom and then surrendering to this powerful natural force. Initially, it does not seem safe. But it soon becomes apparent that submission isn’t a problem. It will be fine. Emerging from this experience is accompanied by a shakiness. But that’s OK too.It’s not necessary to know anything about Lucidvox to be knocked for six by That's What Remained, their second album. Over its eight tracks and 33 minutes it effortlessly accommodates the hard edge of shoegazing – the sensibility sustaining My Bloody Valentine’s “You Made me Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a given that no finer Rachmaninov interpreter exists than Nikolai Lugansky – a few others may see the works differently, not better – and that Vasily Petrenko has an uncanny affinity with both the swagger and the introspection of Elgar. But just how clearly and deeply both made their understanding felt seemed like an harmonious miracle in the most famous of all Second Piano Concertos and a parallel journey of revitalisation from Petrenko in Elgar’s world-embracing First Symphony.So the theme of this season, “Icons Rediscovered”, was for once supremely apt. Petrenko, after an engaging Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Perhaps music and politics should always stay at a decent arm’s length; in the modern world, they seldom can. The Hallé’s annual visit to the Proms presented an all-Russian bill and closed with Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony: his much-disputed “Soviet artist’s response to just criticism” and a classic instance of the collision between art and power as, in 1937, the composer struggled to survive Stalin’s potentially fatal disapproval.Before the interval, the opening work’s cast-list reminded us that current geopolitical tensions also surface in the concert hall. Rachmaninov’s choral symphony Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
One of the most striking scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 outer-space allegory Solaris is psychologist Kris Kelvin’s first encounter with a being which seems to be his wife, who had died a decade earlier. The unsettling incident’s inherent tension is heightened by its sonic backdrop: rumbling, a peculiarly musical pink noise, lightning-like bolts of sound. This was created on the ANS synthesiser (AHC in Russian script), a device invented in Soviet-era Russia.The inspirational figure for the ANS was Boris Yankovsky, who was working with creating synthetic sound from the early 1930s. In 1932, Read more ...
James Birch
In 1988, James Birch – curator, art dealer, and gallery owner – took Francis Bacon to Moscow. It was, as he writes, "an unimaginable intrusion of Western Culture into the heart of the Soviet system". At a time of powerful political tension and suspicion, but also optimism and opportunity, the process of exhibiting Bacon was riddled with difficulties, careful negotiations, joys and disappointments.In this extract, we find James in 1988 and perestroika is in full bloom: General Secretary Gorbachev appears to be at the height of his popularity and power, and a possible democracy beckons. James Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In 1917, in the face of the Bolshevik revolution closing in on his country estate, Rachmaninoff fled Russia, never to return. He was 44, at his peak as composer, pianist and conductor, but spent the rest of his life in exile in the US and Switzerland, amassing a fortune and worldwide reputation as the biggest draw in classical music – but never reconciling himself to being separated from his homeland. As he lay dying, he insisted on a Russian nurse, his wife reading Pushkin to him.The story of Rachmaninoff’s quarter century of exile is well told by Fiona Maddocks in Goodbye Russia, which Read more ...
aleks.sierz
British theatre is getting a bit timid – is that right? Ahead of the opening of this revival of Martin McDonagh’s unforgettable 2003 masterpiece, The Pillowman, its director Matthew Dunster has spoken of the tendency of playwrights and theatres to self-censor nowadays for fear of giving offence. Everyone is getting a bit worried about being cancelled or trolled or attacked for unacceptable opinions. You can see his point: McDonagh is one of those 1990s playwrights whose best work glories in provocation. But Dunster’s West End revival tries to sugar the pill of offence with a cast which Read more ...