Russia
Tom Birchenough
Director Nick Green’s new three-parter follows on the heels of his A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad and comparisons are sure to be made between his two subjects. Though the finer degrees of political power-play – and the sheer quantity of attendant blood-letting – may vary, both investigate how the two autocratic regimes concerned came into being and how they have managed to enjoy such almost total power for so long (and look likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future).The two stories share a central paradox, too, namely the personalities of their leaders. When Syria’s Bashar Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Once upon a time writing an opera was first and foremost a question of choosing a good story. But times move on, and today – as Nicholas Till reminds us in a fascinating programme note for Philip Venables’s and Ted Huffman’s new chamber opera – the medium is the message, and the how has become at least as important as the what. Denis and Katya is a sort of dramatisation of a recent incident (as the police would call it) in Russia in which two 15-year-olds ran away from home, barricaded themselves in her stepfather’s summer retreat, and eventually – after a shoot-out with police – either Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For travellers, “music is a passport, especially in Russia…” Borrowing an adage from the British diplomat Thomas Preston, Sophy Roberts could be speaking about the eccentric quest that lies behind The Lost Pianos of Siberia. Preston, as consul in Yekaterinburg through the Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War, no doubt needed all the extra cultural support he could find, witnessing control of the city pass between the Bolsheviks and the Whites, and living there when the Imperial family met its end. That tragic page of history provides a chapter for Roberts, loosely following her search for Read more ...
David Nice
"Citizen. European. Pianist," declares Russian-born, Berlin-based Igor Levit on the front page of his website. One should add, since he wouldn't, Mensch and master of giants. High-level human integrity seems a given when great pianists essay epics: certainly true of Elisabeth Leonskaja and Imogen Cooper tackling respective sonata trilogies by Beethoven and Schubert, or András Schiff in Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier. Last night was on that level. Questions may linger over the nature of Shostakovich's many-headed hydra of a homage to Bach, but none about Levit's expressive intent and execution Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Uncle Vanya must surely be the closest, the most essential of Chekhov’s plays, its cast – just four main players who are caught up in the drama's fraught emotional action, and four who are essentially supporting – a concentrated unit even by the playwright's lean standards. Its overlapping strands of unrequited love and desperate loneliness are tightly wound, so organically so that any single false note risks throwing the whole off balance. That’s never the case in director Ian Rickson’s exquisite production of this new adaptation by Conor McPherson, one which stretches the original in Read more ...
Nadine Meisner
It’s no surprise that audiences love John Cranko’s Onegin, with its vividly economical narrative (close to Tchaikovsky’s opera), attractive decors by Jürgen Rose, and intelligent drama. True, it feels a tad old-fashioned – although that, as my neighbour observed, is part of the charm. Performers love it too, for the meaty roles it gives to its principals and the emotional swoop of their dances. You just have to make sure that you are absolutely right for the task, as the otherwise irreproachable Vadim Muntagirov found out at the eleventh hour, causing him to be replaced in the title role by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Putin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky are “strong”, a Russian journalist considers. “Everyone else – weak.” This is essentially Khodorkovsky’s opinion, too, after the former oil oligarch’s decade in a Siberian jail for suggesting the President was corrupt to his face on TV.Prolific documentarist Alex Gibney uses Khodorkovsky’s rise and fall to consider Russia’s Wild West, seven years in which seven oligarchs bought up half the economy, as below them chaotic new market forces shocked the nation with destitution and Sicilian levels of gangster mayhem, while Boris Yeltsin slumped zombie-like in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Inua Ellams’ Three Sisters plays Chekhov in the shadow of war, specifically the Nigerian-Biafran secessionist conflict of the late 1960s which so bitterly divided that newly independent nation. It’s a bold move that adds decided new relevance to the action, grounding proceedings that are more often generalised in their listless disappointment to a very particular time and place. We certainly view the travails of the Chekhov’s eponymous protagonists – instead of Olga, Masha and Irina, here they are Lolo, Nne Chukwu and Udo – in a different light when starving refugees and the battle Read more ...
James Dowsett
When U.S. president George W. Bush looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin he famously “saw his soul”. In his latest meditation on modern Russia, Britain's top Kremlinologist Robert Service gets as close to the Russian president’s soul as may be possible in a scholarly account. No less could have been expected from the author of a series of magisterial biographies on the Soviet leaders, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. Service offers us no clumsy caricatures in Kremlin Winter. He does not try to scare us with bogeymen. His even-handed, level-headed analysis restores critical ambiguity to the riddle Read more ...
theartsdesk
Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former USSR conducting interviews with the “the little great people” who had lived under Soviet communism and witnessed its demise. The resulting book, Second-Hand Time, is an oral history which tells through the words of ordinary people the end of what she, in her 2015 Nobel Prize lecture, called a “historical experiment”. This is the third of three extracts.Margarita K., Armenian refugee, 41 years oldOh! That’s not what I’m talking about… that’s not what I want to Read more ...
theartsdesk
Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former USSR conducting interviews with the “the little great people” who had lived under Soviet communism and witnessed its demise. The resulting book, Second-Hand Time, is an oral history which tells through the words of ordinary people the end of what she, in her 2015 Nobel Prize lecture, called a “historical experiment”. This is the second of three extracts.Alisa Z., advertising manager, 35 years oldI went to St Petersburg to get a different story but came back Read more ...
theartsdesk
Between 1991 to 2012, Belorussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich travelled the countries that constituted the former USSR conducting interviews with the “the little great people” who had lived under Soviet communism and witnessed its demise. The resulting book, Second-Hand Time, is an oral history which tells through the words of ordinary people the end of what she, in her 2015 Nobel Prize lecture, called a “historical experiment”. This is the first of three extracts.— My whole life, I’ve kept my arms at my sides! I didn’t dare breathe a word of any of this to anyone. Now, Read more ...