Georgia
David Nice
Three live, very alive Symphonie fantastiques in a year may seem a lot. But such is Berlioz’s precise, unique and somehow modern imagination that you can always discover something new, especially given the intense hard work on detail of Antonio Pappano and what is now very much “his” London Symphony Orchestra. They and Lisa Batiashvili also helped to keep Szymanowski’s hothouse First Violin Concerto in focus, too.There can’t be a more exhilarating curtain-up to a concert than Berlioz’s equally fertile Le Corsaire Overture. The whiplash timpani, the unison helter-skelters of strings later meet Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
One of the most exciting new voices in Eastern European film, Déa Kulumbegashvili is not concerned with conventional shot lengths. She has been described as a director of "slow cinema", which she regards as a compliment.Kulumbegashvili's intention is to create an imaginative space that uncovers the truths behind patriarchal expectations and misogyny, without ever limiting the viewer's experience or agency. Characterized by carefully crafted but disorienting compositions, her storytelling is fiercely confrontational.Her second feature, April, combines revealing social realism with Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s easy to see metaphors about the status of modern Georgia, once again threatened by the Russian boot, in its recent artistic output. So while there are no overt political allusions in director Dea Kulumbegashshvili’s April, at its core you sense a tacit and urgent debate about how to square your conscience with the “rules” that govern the country’s conduct.The heroine of the piece is Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an actual heroine of a sort. She’s an OB/GYN hospital doctor who risks her career by dispensing contraceptive pills and performing (illegal) abortions in remote villages for women in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Crossing is a remarkable step forward for Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin. There are elements that build on his acclaimed 2019 Tbilisi drama And Then We Danced, but his new film is rich with a new complexity, as well as a redolent melancholy, a loose road-movie that speaks with considerable profundity of the overlapping worlds in which it is set.The journey in question is from Batumi, the main seaport city of southwest Georgia, to Istanbul, where the greater part of the story unfolds, although narrative in itself is of less importance, Akin’s emphasis instead being on observational Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
For a small nation, with a population not quite comparable to Scotland’s, Georgia has for long packed a mighty musical punch. Any visitor will know the soul-wrenching power of its choral polyphony, but a post-Soviet generation of classical soloists now walks proudly across the world stage. Pianist Mariam Batsashvili, only just 30, won the Franz Liszt international competition in 2014 and has since been a BBC New Generation artist. Last night’s Wigmore Hall recital (not her first) put Liszt’s music at the heart of a programme that revealed the almost-symphonic textures and colours that a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This debut feature from the young Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili is exceptional in many ways. It stands out not only for its hypnotic quality as a film that feels like that of an already formed auteur, as well as for the complex psychological portrait of its central female character, but also, rather more paradoxically, for the environment from which it has emerged.Always distinctive, the cinema of the small Caucasian nation of Georgia has usually been distinguished by its vivid local colour, but there’s nothing like that here: though it’s set in the director’s homeland – Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The final sequence of Levan Akin’s coming-of-age drama And Then We Danced is as gloriously defiant a piece of dance action as anything you’ll remember falling for in Billy Elliot.Merab, the film’s youthful dancer protagonist (played by Levan Gelbakhiani, pictured below, in his first screen role) has been through a lot by then – the trials of first love, exacerbated by the realisation that he’s gay – and those closing minutes see him asserting his right to be who he is at an audition that pits him against his highly conservative surroundings.It’s a clash of values in every sense. The Georgian Read more ...
David Nice
There's something about the very opening of a Mahler symphony which gives you an idea of how the rest of the performance will go. In the case of the Second, the inescapable "Resurrection", it's the ferocity behind the upper string tremolo and the wildness of the uprush from cellos and basses. To kick off the first full Tsinandali Festival in the wonderful part-open auditorium recently constructed on a country estate in Georgia's wine-growing district, there was that special shock of the new you only get from young players experiencing the work for the first time.The Armenians, Azeris, Read more ...
David Nice
Two hours' drive from Tbilisi over a beautiful mountain pass, lushly wooded on the descent, the Tsinandali Estate has been central to Georgia's wine-growing district of Kakheti since poet-prince Prince Alexander Chavchavadze produced the first bottle in 1841. Natives and overseas tourists come to wander the English-style arboretum, described by Alexandre Dumas the Elder as the Garden of Eden, and visit the modest palace where rakish Russian writer Griboyedov putatively seduced his host’s 16 year old daughter Nino, married her and travelled with her to Iran, where he was promptly murdered in Read more ...
David Nice
Even given the peerless standards already set by Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in their Sibelius cycle, this instalment was always going to be the toughest, featuring the most elusive of the symphonies, the Sixth, and the sparest, the Fourth. As it turned out, all challenges were met with Oramo's characteristic mix of energy and sophistication, and the interloper, Swedish composer Anders Hillborg's Second Violin Concerto in its UK premiere, saw to it that Lisa Batiashvili carried the flame.Was it going to be generic contemporary? The skeetering strings at the beginning suggested Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Readers of a certain type of lifestyle blog will be familiar with the concept of hygge. The Danish word, which refers to a state of cosiness and good cheer in which to survive the winter months, is nothing new – but this year, it’s popping up everywhere badged as a lifestyle trend. Hygge in 2016 is grey-knit blankets that look homemade, but which retail for £100; it’s steaming, monogrammed mugs of hot chocolate and rose-gold pillows. And it’s In Winter, Katie Melua’s collaboration with the Gori Women’s Choir – basic, yes; but there’s a reason nobody can resist the tie-in candle collaboration Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Georgian director Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines made the shortlist of five for last year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar category (it didn't win). It was nominated from Georgia, but could equally well have represented Estonia: this incrementally powerful anti-war film is that rarest of things, a co-production between two rather different countries with a story that draws genuinely on the worlds of both.The consequences – human, most of all – of the break-up of the Soviet Union as it accelerated through the second half of 1991 haven’t been reflected all that widely in cinema, and Tangerines is Read more ...