Russia
The Reagan Show review - engaging but frustratingMonday, 02 October 2017
The Reagan administration produced as much video content as the previous five administrations combined. That’s the claim early on in The Reagan Show, an engaging but ultimately frustrating documentary compiled entirely from archive footage by co-... Read more... |
Zoology review - the tale of a tailTuesday, 26 September 2017
Russia has its own rich traditions of satire and the grotesque, but at first glance we may wonder whether in his new film Zoology Ivan I Tverdovsky, a director who, still to turn 30, certainly belongs to the new generation of that country’s... Read more... |
Stravinsky Ballets, LSO, Rattle, Barbican review - the big three burn with focused energyFriday, 22 September 2017
“Next he’ll be walking on water,” allegedly quipped a distinguished figure at the official opening of Simon Rattle’s new era at the helm of the London Symphony Orchestra. Well, last night, with no celebratory overload around the main event, the... Read more... |
Proms 67 & 68 review: Freiburg Baroque, Heras-Casado / Mariinsky, Gergiev - reformation and revolutionMonday, 04 September 2017
Even tuning up, the multinational musicians of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra make a lovely sound, well-anchored by the tug of four period-instrument cellos and three basses, yet buoyant and stippled with upper-wind colours, flutes circling and... Read more... |
Prom 63 review: Gerstein, BBCSO, Bychkov - total mastery of orchestral soundFriday, 01 September 2017
No-one, least of all the players, will forget Semyon Bychkov’s 2009 Proms appearance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a poleaxing interpretation of Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony. They had already made the history books this Proms season with a... Read more... |
Proms at...Cadogan Hall review: Pavel Kolesnikov - Chopin takes flightTuesday, 29 August 2017
If individual greatness is to be found in the way an artist begins and ends a phrase, or finds magical transitions both within and between pieces, then Pavel Kolesnikov is already up there with the top pianists. Listeners tuning in midway through... Read more... |
Proms 37 / 38 review: Latvian Radio Choir, Gavrylyuk, BBCSSO, Dausgaard - numinous Rachmaninov triptychMonday, 14 August 2017
So it was Rachmaninov night at the Proms, but with a difference: a trinity of works sacred and profane, the first two introduced by the Latvian choir due to perform the third singing harmonised Russian Orthodox chants of the kind on which the... Read more... |
Prom 29 review: BBCSO, Bychkov - Musorgsky's Khovanshchina sears in concertMonday, 07 August 2017
"Ura!" as soldiers cry in Russian epic opera's last fling, Prokofiev's War and Peace: supertitles have arrived at the Proms, after much special pleading here and elsewhere. They're needed more than ever in Musorgsky's typically quirky survey of... Read more... |
10 Questions for actress Tracy-Ann Oberman: 'it's made me pretty fearless'Monday, 03 July 2017
What do you call a woman who murdered Dirty Den, is the darling of TV comedy producers, writes radio plays about the golden age of Hollywood, hosted and judged Channel 4’s Jewish Mum of the Year, was until just a few weeks ago tap dancing through... Read more... |
Jonathan Miles: St Petersburg review - culture and calamitySunday, 02 July 2017
Talk about survival: St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, now again St Petersburg, all the same city, has it nailed down. It was founded through the mad enthusiasm, intelligence, determination and just off-the-scale energy of Peter the Great in 1703... Read more... |
Elif Batuman: The Idiot review - memories of student life and travels meanderSunday, 11 June 2017
University, anyone? Student days? If you were ever an undergraduate, who does not remember the simultaneous sense of dislocation and excitement, the feeling of the familiar combined with a heady awareness that we might fall off a cliff,... Read more... |
Evgeny Kissin: Memoirs and Reflections review - Russian education, European conviction, Jewish heritageSunday, 04 June 2017
"Generally speaking," writes Evgeny Kissin in one of the many generous tributes to those whose artistry he most admires, "the mastery of [Carlo Maria] Giulini is exactly what is dearest of all to me in art: simplicity, depth and spirituality". The... Read more... |
