St Petersburg
David Nice
Even that most unpredictable of fantasists Nikolay Gogol might have been surprised to find his Nose, wandering far from the face of Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov, sung by a high tenor in an unlikely operatic adaptation of his wackiest story. Give the singing role, as Barrie Kosky does, to another character, and show the giant-sized Nose
– here a boy dancer
– without any token apparel of his supposed high rank before which lowly official Kovalov absurdly grovels, and you miss the point of a vintage scene in Shostakovich's The Nose. Fortunately Kosky has plenty of ingenious riffs Read more ...
Nadine Meisner
On Thursday the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra swooped into Cardiff for the ballet company’s only UK dates this year. Appearing at the Wales Millennium Centre for just four ballet performances, plus a family concert of Peter and the Wolf, the Mariinsky’s arrival does seem an extravagant indulgence by its backers, especially with the decision to show exclusively contemporary, Western-style, ballet programmes.Like the Bolshoi, the Mariinsky has at times acquired contemporary Western ballets, even during Soviet days, but in the past two decades the drive to westernise has intensified and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A good half of the portraits in Russia and the Arts are of figures without whom any conception of 19th century European culture would be incomplete. A felicitous subtitle, “The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky”, provides a natural, even easy point of orientation for those approaching Russian culture, and with it the country’s history and character, without particular advance knowledge.Much is new here, not least the artists themselves, none of whose names are anywhere near as well-known as their subjects. The wider intellectual world they inhabited may seem remote, with its conflicts between Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The second album by Russian shoegazers Pinkshinyultrablast neatly side-steps any language-barrier issues either by submerging their mono-monikered singer Lyubov’s voice into their sea of noise, or ensuring that what is heard could be wordless singing along the lines of The Swingle Singers – even though she sings in English. As it should be with music so much about texture, the sound of Pinkshinyultrablast marks them as virtuosos of the indirect.However, where they draw from is clear. As it was with their debut album, 2015’s Everything Else Matters, Cocteau Twins, Lush, Slowdive and, of course Read more ...
David Nice
What fun it must have been to attend any of the St Petersburg Free Music School concerts during the second half of the 19th century. Balakirev, idiosyncratic mentor of the group briefly together as the "Mighty Handful", and his acolytes – Borodin, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and the one we usually don't mention, César Cui – would have had orchestral works and sometimes the odd aria from an opera-in-progress on the programme, often alongside music by their western idols Berlioz, Liszt and Schumann. If something wasn't ready, which was often the case, colleagues would help out or offer a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
So, Andrew Davies has bitten off the big one. It may have come as a surprise to some that the master of adapting the British classics for television hadn’t read Tolstoy’s classic-to-end-all-classics until the BBC mooted the idea of a new screen version, but this first episode (of six) boded very well all the same.It was Davies adeptly laying out the domestic ground (battlefields, too), and introducing the characters. For anyone intimidated by the length of the original novel – not to mention the heavy accretions of philosophy and history that Tolstoy loaded onto it – the surprise may have Read more ...
David Nice
Russian classics evening at the Proms? It could be what Alexandra Coghlan, writing about Prom 69, described as “another night at the musical office”. But given the masters in charge of two masterpieces fusing storytelling with symphonic sweep and one deservedly popular standard, there was no chance of that. Nikolai Lugansky is the only pianist I’d go out of my way to hear live in Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto, and while Yuri Temirkanov’s programmes with the St Petersburg Philharmonic have been pickled in aspic for years, their music-making together certainly hasn’t. The results were better in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There can’t be many American public figures who are welcome on Russian television these days, but Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage is one of them. In Hunted: Gay and Afraid we saw him sitting in on legislative gatherings too, and when the World Congress of Families (WCF) holds its assemblies in Moscow – which it seems to do quite often – the atmosphere is of a meeting of minds between leading Russian politicians and the ideologues of the conservative, Christian-aligned American organisations that, through their emphatic upholding of traditional values, effectively reject Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.Exploring the theme of how architecture interacts with human beings, and attempting to capture the soul of the buildings themselves, he wrote a poem on the subject with the lines: “Some would just whisper,/ some would loudly sing their own praises,/ while others would modestly mumble a few words/ and really have nothing to say.”Sometimes the 3D effects are spectacular, and seem completely integral to the resultIt was an idea that obviously came to fascinate Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The ballerina claque wars that generally accompany visits here by the Mariinsky Ballet are raging particularly feverishly this year, but it all falls silent when Uliana Lopatkina makes one of her increasingly rare appearances. So much noise is focused on legginess or hip flexibility of these size-zero ballerinas, and yet the Mariinsky knows more than any other company in history that it is not body but mind that matters in the final analysis. Their luminous historical legend Galina Ulanova was nothing to look at physically, until she started dancing.Lopatkina once set the new bar for Read more ...
theartsdesk
Following theartsdesk's Monday opinion piece on reasons for moving towards a boycott on Valery Gergiev's concerts, and in the general climate created by other reports and protests, the conductor has issued the following statement, to which David Nice responds with an open letter.Valery Gergiev's statementI am aware of the gay rights protest that took place at the Barbican last week prior to my concert with the LSO. I have said before that I do not discriminate against anyone, gay or otherwise, and never have done, and as head of the Mariinsky Theatre this is our policy. It is wrong to suggest Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Respect and dignity, intolerance and hatred: the poles were set far apart in Stephen Fry: Out There. It’s good to have Fry the thoughtful presenter back – it’s been a long time since his The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive – on a subject close to his heart, how gay people are faring in various parts of the world. This first episode took us to Uganda and Los Angeles, while part two on Wednesday drops in on Brazil, Russia and India. Quite an itinerary for two hours of television – fitted in over two years, during gaps in Fry’s other commitments – and it’s to Fergus O’Brien’s directing Read more ...