Moscow
Ismene Brown
Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi Ballet artistic director whose sight was maimed two years ago by an acid attack organized by a disgruntled dancer, will lose his job when his contract expires next spring. Bolshoi Theatre chief Vladimir Urin announced yesterday in Moscow that he is abolishing Filin’s position and replacing it with a more management-focused director, indicating that artistic decision-making is to be taken "jointly" with the theatre directorate.The new director will be named and introduced in September when the company returns from their summer break. Urin refused to give a name, but Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last week the 15th International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow was rung down with a sigh of relief for the home team, with once again a Russian pianist in possession of the gold medal, Dmitry Masleev following 2011’s Daniil Trifonov. It was all very satisfactory for President Putin as he delivered his speech at the winners’ gala, being Tchaikovsky’s 175th anniversary year, but it was not a result that many disputed. The modest Siberian, 27, is a thoughtful pianist as well as a powerful one in traditional Russian manner.All the same, Masleev was not the pianist who will be remembered as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The idea of a movie spin-off from BBC One's spy show Spooks has been lurking with intent ever since the tenth and final series ended in 2011. Finally it's here, helmed by director Bharat Nalluri (who shot the first and last episodes for TV) and with Peter Firth's Sir Harry Pearce at its centre. Where, as the Spookfather-in-chief, he had to be.Since Spooks stuck unswervingly to its grand tradition of bumping off leading characters – diehards will still be wiping away a tear at memories of Rupert Penry-Jones's Adam Carter, Richard Armitage's Lucas North and Nicola Walker's Ruth Evershed – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
During its 10-season run on BBC One between May 2002 and October 2011, Spooks built a lasting reputation as a superior espionage thriller, charting the battle of a squad of MI5 agents to protect the realm against its fiendish and unscrupulous adversaries. Despite the inevitable plot-holes and sometimes incredible storylines, Spooks managed to keep itself anchored in the bleak realities of intelligence work, where it was wise to trust nobody and if you were paranoid, that's because the bad guys really were out to get you.As a string of leading actors such as Matthew Macfadyen, Keeley Read more ...
David Nice
Russia isn’t the only country where violations of personal freedoms and censorship seem to be mounting by the day, but it’s surely the most confused: ask any of the persecutors what they hope to achieve, and you won’t get a convincing answer. Moral topsy-turvyness and unforeseen consequences are very much at the heart of what Cheek by Jowl’s director Declan Donnellan, its designer Nick Ormerod and their Russian actors seem to be aiming for, whether with intentional links to the host country or not it’s impossible to say, in a relentless but also unpredictable take on one of Shakespeare’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Russia’s national gallery, the Tretyakov, bears the name of its founder Pavel Tretyakov, the 19th-century merchant who bequeathed his huge collection of Russian art to the city of Moscow in 1892. His bust stands proudly overseeing the entrance to the gallery’s old building, a fine, purpose-built example of early Russian 20th-century architecture.But the Tretyakov has a new wing, dating from the mid-1980s and less architecturally august, that is far less known (and much less visited), which houses its collection of Russian and Soviet art of the 20th century. If any figure deserved a memorial Read more ...
fisun.guner
As Shakespeare is to these native isles, so Pushkin is to Russia. And Eugene Onegin, Alexander Puskin’s enduring verse novel first published in serial form in 1825, is the most honoured and beloved of all Russian classics. Outside Russia, the story is, of course, most familiar to us through Tchaikovsky’s great opera. We also have John Cranko’s 1965 ballet, set to other music by Tchaikovsky, a production of which is currently selling out at the Royal Opera House. Now a rare spoken-word adaptation is setting the bar. Presented in two acts, and running at nearly three and a half hours, it Read more ...
David Nice
All happy families are alike, Tolstoy declares at the start of Anna Karenina, but this adaptation of War and Peace stresses how the surviving Rostovs and Bolkonskys went through various hells to get to that enviable state. In this one respect consummate mover and shaper Timberlake Wertenbaker steals a march on her author. Isn’t there a feeling of flatness when we find Natasha and Pierre sunk in seemingly trivial domestic bliss towards the end of the novel? By having them, and the equally contented married couple of Princess Marya and Natasha’s brother Nikolay, recollect with anything but Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Printed large in glorious colour is a row of photographs of Russian women wearing bobble hats (main picture and pictured below). There’s a fuzzy red one, a woolly brown one, one with red stripes against black and another with raised white stripes. Seen from behind, these hand-knitted globes look like a newly discovered breed of sea anemone or a display of exotic cacti.An accompanying drawing shows a woman in a bobble hat standing in front of a church whose onion domes are the same shape as her headgear. The drawing is black and white, but the domes of many Russian churches, including Saint Read more ...
David Nice
Earlier this year two giant puppets, plus a bottom (lower case, human) on wheels, dominated Shakespeare’s dream play at the Barbican. Replace the bottom with an ever-present little dog and you might think we’re back more or less where we started nine months ago. But what the febrile imagination of Russian theatre surrealist Dmitry Krymov gives us is the rude mechanicals’ Very Lamentable Comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, Sort Of, along with audience interpolations beyond anything the priggish Theseus, Hippolyta and lovers ever ventured, in an often hilarious, occasionally tedious and anything but Read more ...
David Nice
Bakst’s harem drapes and Roerich’s smoking, steaming Polovtsian camp may not have had the most lavish of recreations. But the rest of this homage to Diaghilev shone with an exuberance and even a precision one would not have thought possible from previous seasons of what had once seemed like Andris Liepa’s Ballets Russes vanity project. Mariinsky star of long standing Yulia Makhalina sprinkled gala stardust, the corps of the revelatory Natalia Sats Children’s Theatre re-enacted Fokine’s routines with theatrical flair and that energy levels were so high throughout had everything to do with the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“We are not politicians – we are artists.” It’s the familiar cry of creatives all around the world, but it came with an added, rather surprising accent when uttered by Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) president Nikita Mikhalkov at the event’s closing ceremony.Specifically, he was responding to similar optimism from Ukraine’s Sergei Trimbach: “Culture must resist political madness. Political lunacy should not dictate the rules of life; artists should be together.” Trimbach is the head of Ukraine’s Union of Cinematographers, while Mikhalkov has long been head of Russia’s analogous Read more ...