Russia
stephen.walsh
About Khovanshchina I once had serious doubts. Leaving aside its unfinished condition, it always struck me as what Wagnerians would call a bleeding chunk of history, unstructured, confused, over-researched and dramaturgically obscure. Three recent performances in Shostakovich’s powerful performing edition of Mussorgsky's incomplete original have completely changed my mind: Graham Vick’s incomparable “promenade” production in the People’s Tent at Edgbaston three years ago, Semyon Bychkov’s Proms performance this summer, and now this revival of David Pountney’s at that time still problematic Read more ...
David Kettle
The Reagan administration produced as much video content as the previous five administrations combined. That’s the claim early on in The Reagan Show, an engaging but ultimately frustrating documentary compiled entirely from archive footage by co-directors Sierra Pettengill and Pacho Velez. So remorseless was the administration’s taping of carefully staged scenes or managed press conferences that it even got its own name – White House TV.And if JFK was the first US president to harness the power of television, then Reagan was the first to embark on a concerted attempt to manipulate the broader Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russia has its own rich traditions of satire and the grotesque, but at first glance we may wonder whether in his new film Zoology Ivan I Tverdovsky, a director who, still to turn 30, certainly belongs to the new generation of that country’s filmmakers, has borrowed a leaf from another master of such forms, Franz Kafka. Not unlike the change experienced by Josef K in the Czech writer’s The Metamorphosis, the heroine of Tverdovsky’s film undergoes a grotesque physical transformation: she grows a tail.Natasha (Natalya Pavlenkova, luminously vulnerable) is a harried single woman working in a Read more ...
David Nice
“Next he’ll be walking on water,” allegedly quipped a distinguished figure at the official opening of Simon Rattle’s new era at the helm of the London Symphony Orchestra. Well, last night, with no celebratory overload around the main event, the homecomer was flying like a firebird, and taking a newly galvanised orchestra with him, at the start of another genuine spectacular. And that's no exaggeration, for how often, if ever, have you encountered all three of Stravinsky’s biggest, and earliest, ballets in a single concert?This journey from the compendium-salute to the Russian romantic Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Even tuning up, the multinational musicians of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra make a lovely sound, well-anchored by the tug of four period-instrument cellos and three basses, yet buoyant and stippled with upper-wind colours, flutes circling and dipping like a cliff-edge bird colony. Ideal, then, for the Hebrides Overture which opened this Mendelssohn matinee (★★★★).With the gentlest of rhythmic swells in the violins, just enough turbulence registered beneath the surface to give an early hint of what would become a subtly revisionist account, formed in the quietly authoritative hands of Pablo Read more ...
David Nice
No-one, least of all the players, will forget Semyon Bychkov’s 2009 Proms appearance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a poleaxing interpretation of Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony. They had already made the history books this Proms season with a searing concert performance of Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina when last night they did it again with a Tchaikovsky Manfred at the same, highest, level as the team's Barbican Francesca da Rimini.Bychkov is one of those conductors who bring a special, deep-level sound with them. It helps that the BBCSO is in top form after years of training with the late Read more ...
David Nice
If individual greatness is to be found in the way an artist begins and ends a phrase, or finds magical transitions both within and between pieces, then Pavel Kolesnikov is already up there with the top pianists. Listeners tuning in midway through the peaks of his lunchtime Prom – the great Chopin Fantaisie or the Fourth Scherzo – might have thought they were listening to an old master, while what we saw was a modest 28-year-old who looks much younger, but who moves with total assurance and absence of flash. His performance of Tchaikovsky's massive Second Piano Concerto with the Read more ...
David Nice
So it was Rachmaninov night at the Proms, but with a difference: a trinity of works sacred and profane, the first two introduced by the Latvian choir due to perform the third singing harmonised Russian Orthodox chants of the kind on which the composer based so many of his supposedly late-romantic inspirations. That was bound to enliven a bog-standard programme of the Third Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony. But there was plenty of fresh food in soloist Alexander Gavrylyuk’s singular take on "the Rach Three", and Thomas Dausgaard, principal conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Read more ...
David Nice
"Ura!" as soldiers cry in Russian epic opera's last fling, Prokofiev's War and Peace: supertitles have arrived at the Proms, after much special pleading here and elsewhere. They're needed more than ever in Musorgsky's typically quirky survey of rival interest-groups at the beginning of young Tsar Peter I's reign, though I like to think that newcomers to Khovanshchina ("The Khovansky Business") would have got the message about each formidable personage and scene without them, so vivid was this realisation of the way Musorgsky characterises roistering princes, humble scribes and calm Old Read more ...
David Benedict
What do you call a woman who murdered Dirty Den, is the darling of TV comedy producers, writes radio plays about the golden age of Hollywood, hosted and judged Channel 4’s Jewish Mum of the Year, was until just a few weeks ago tap dancing through eight shows a week in Stepping Out in the West End and was runner-up on Celebrity Mastermind with her specialist subject: The Imperial Roman Family Augustus to Claudius Caesar?Most people call her Tracy-Ann Oberman. I call her my cousin. OK, that’s not absolutely accurate. She’s actually my cousin’s husband’s stepmother’s niece. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Talk about survival: St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, now again St Petersburg, all the same city, has it nailed down. It was founded through the mad enthusiasm, intelligence, determination and just off-the-scale energy of Peter the Great in 1703, built on the bodies of around 30,000 labourers (not the 300,000 that later rumours have suggested) at the whim of an Emperor. You can visit his original wooden cabin there today; the nobles he ordered, on pain of forfeiting titles and wealth, to come and live in his new city had to build in stone.It has been at times the capital of Russia. Its Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
University, anyone? Student days? If you were ever an undergraduate, who does not remember the simultaneous sense of dislocation and excitement, the feeling of the familiar combined with a heady awareness that we might fall off a cliff, metaphorically speaking, at any moment?University life in various guises is at the centre of The Idiot. Elif Batuman is an autobiographical writer whose subject is her own intellectual and geographical adventures, imbued with a sense of discovery and emotional involvement that does not seem to depend on amatory alliances, unless you count the books and authors Read more ...