Russia
David Nice
Born in 1945 to Russian parents in Tbilisi, Georgia, Elisabeth Leonskaja gave her first major recital at the age of 11 and went on to study at the Moscow Conservatory, emigrating from the Soviet Union to Vienna in 1978 and making a sensational Salzburg Festival debut a year later. Among several unsurpassable recordings are her partnership with the Borodin Quartet in Shostakovich's Piano Quintet, and she has always cited her duo work with the very choosy Richter as a formative influence in her musical life. Here they are playing the first movement of Mozart's Sonata facile K 545, with the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In England you may joke about having Siberian weather with minus 7 degrees. This is really what Siberian winter looks like - at minus 26 degrees. The river is gushing steam, a hellishly peculiar sight. After travelling for 16 hours and through seven time zones to get to Krasnoyarsk at six in the morning, I am not sure I’m seeing what I’m seeing.Krasnoyarsk is plumb above Mongolia, and nearly the last stop east on the Trans-Siberian railway before you enter the empty white taiga, where almost no one can live. It is 4,000 kilometres back west to get to Moscow - and that’s only halfway back to Read more ...
David Nice
That in itself was enough to tell us that Petrenko isn’t just a supremely elegant conductor, an easy stylist able to make Stravinsky’s fiddly early Scherzo fantastique sound natural and to paper over the cracks of a tottering soloist, Oleg Marshev, in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, but already one with the wow factor, the ability to go beyond merely brilliant music-making to something altogether deeper and more unexpected.For the first three movements of Shostakovich’s hour-long narrative, I went along with all the sonic marvels but I can’t say I felt it in every bone of my body. This is Read more ...
simon.mcburney
For anyone who grew up in the former Soviet Union, Heart of a Dog is a seminal text. But it’s also in the great tradition of Gogol and all the Russian satirists. It springs out into absolutely delicious flights of fantasy, but really sharp-edged. The mixture is there in Ostrovsky too: both very dark and very funny and also suddenly beautifully poetic. The theme of the piece is the manipulation of people, about the way that in 1926, after the new economic miracle, Stalin has come into power and a lot of people realise that something is turning sour. It’s like when we got New Labour and people Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is rare that you read a book, and mentally shout “Yes! Yes!” as you tick off all the things you agree with, but had never actually verbalised. It is even rarer to read a book where, in a subject you know pretty well, on almost every page you learn at least one fascinating new thing. But Jennifer Homans’ Apollo’s Angels is that book.Much has been made of Homan’s epilogue, in which she mourns the death of ballet, the art she so loves. I can understand her feelings – I even feel the same emotion that she does, at least in part. It’s merely that I think she’s wrong (the only place I do). Read more ...
David Nice
From discreetly poisoned violets at Covent Garden to buckets of man-dog blood in St Martin’s Lane has been quite a leap this week. True, the bourgeois plastic surgeon of Mikhail Bulgakov’s scabrous, long-suppressed 1925 novella goes about singing Aida while implanting testes and pituitary glands. But such melodies are only satirical snippets in Alexander Raskatov’s febrile newish score. And that needs the jumpy fantasias of Complicite style, not the lavish historical realism of David McVicar: which means both ENO and the Royal Opera are currently excelling in what they do best.For make no Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Because it was the capricious Finn who got us going and provided us with the evening's only chunks of nourishment. His performance of Rodion Shchedrin's Fourth Piano Concerto was joyous and thrilling. I wasn't expecting a great deal from Shchedrin after the critical drubbing the opening salvo in this mini-celebration received on theartsdesk. But, despite passages that stewed in a vat of concentrated Shostakovich for far too long, I was pleasantly surprised overall.The piano voice of this Fourth Concerto is quite unlike any other. Soaked in Carnatic flavours and free-form jazz, it emerges into Read more ...
David Nice
She did more to make Prokofiev remembered and reassessed than most of the great performers. Noëlle Mann, who died earlier this year from cancer at the age of 63, was the doyenne of Prokofiev studies: vivacious guardian of the Prokofiev Archive at Goldsmiths College - without which the fresh research in the first volume of my Prokofiev biography would not have been possible - and editor of the impeccably produced journal Three Oranges; instigator of the Centre for Russian Music, now in the expert hands of Alexander Ivashkin; and passionate driving force behind numerous events, conferences and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russia marks the centenary of the death of Leo Tolstoy on 20 November – but the level of local tribute to one of the country’s greatest writers seems markedly muted for a figure two of whose novels, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, are regularly ranked in Top 10 lists by writers and readers around the world. We may forget today, however, that Tolstoy almost abandoned fiction for much of the second half of his life to concentrate on social issues that saw him become a figure whose opinions were listened to around the world. At home he became increasingly a thorn in the side of the ruling Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As well as being a great artist, Leonardo da Vinci designed machine guns, tanks and cluster bombs and worked out how to build a submarine; but so appalled was he by the potential of this last invention that he coded his notes to prevent anyone using them to instigate what he called "murder at the bottom of the seas".Murder at sea is exactly what submarines are meant for, of course, while their ability to cruise unseen beneath the waves makes them not only lethal but extremely sinister; more than any other weapons system they have become emblems of predatory stealth and evil intent. Coming Read more ...
David Nice
Shchedrin's best works, in my experience - and his output has been prolific of late - colour and treat the themes of others: chastushki or Russian street songs in the brilliant Naughty Limericks Concerto (to be heard in the second programme of the season), Tchaikovsky in the Anna Karenina ballet and Bizet in his best-known score, music from Carmen arranged for strings and percussion to fit the brilliance of his great ballerina wife, Maya Plisetskaya.Last night I found I liked the so-called Carmen Suite - ie the complete ballet score - a little less than I used to. Its more playful aspects Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin has long been damned faintly by two facts - that he is the husband of the Bolshoi prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and that he was for a long time the president of the Russian Composers' Union in the USSR. These two things were plenty enough to remove discussion of him from the musical arena to the seething forum of politics where every Soviet composer's actions were given intense non-musical scrutiny both inside and outside the USSR.Recently, however, Shchedrin - now 78 and long hardly heard in Russian and European concert halls coming to terms with Read more ...