Russia
Wang, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Dausgaard, Barbican HallSaturday, 23 February 2013
Orchestral volcanoes were erupting all over Europe around the year 1915. It was courageous enough to make a mountain chain out of three of them in a single concert. I was less prepared for the white-heat focus applied by that stalwart Dane Thomas... Read more... |
Gerstein, Philharmonia Orchestra, Gardner, Royal Festival HallMonday, 18 February 2013
You don’t have to live under a totalitarian regime to write music of profound anguish. I was driven to argue the point at a Shostakovich symposium when an audience quizzer took issue with my assertion that Britten could go just as deep as the... Read more... |
Eugene Onegin, Royal OperaTuesday, 05 February 2013
Studying Russian for three years to read Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin in the original doesn’t guarantee the finest interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s equally great lyric homage. Yet it certainly seems to have focused the imagination of Covent... Read more... |
DVD: Anna KareninaFriday, 01 February 2013
Joe Wright’s screen adaptation of Tolstoy’s giant of a masterpiece, scripted by Tom Stoppard, takes a big risk that pays off: the many-layered late 19th-century novel is stripped to its bare bones with astonishing brio. He sets most of the story in... Read more... |
Bankruptcy won't stop the balletMonday, 28 January 2013
The Mikhailovsky Ballet's general director, Russia's fruit tycoon Vladimir Kekhman, may just have been declared bankrupt, but the company is pressing ahead with its star-studded London trip in March. Fraud investigators last week raided the... Read more... |
Interview: Bolshoi Ballet director Sergei Filin says, 'I'll be back'Wednesday, 23 January 2013
Bolshoi Ballet director Sergei Filin has vowed to return from the horror of an acid attack to lead Russia's flagship ballet company - "not handsome, but in full force", in a remarkable interview from his hospital bed. Facing two solid days of... Read more... |
Harlekin, Derevo, Linbury Studio TheatreThursday, 17 January 2013
I've always keenly anticipated Derevo. A rare sight in London, they are the must-catch company in a singular branch of mime theatre - some would call it clowning, from an oblique, dark place of visions, fears and childlike imaginings. They are a... Read more... |
Yevgeny Sudbin, Westminster Cathedral HallMonday, 14 January 2013
It was the kind of programme that great pianist Vladimir Horowitz used to pioneer, with the simple balm of Scarlatti offset by Scriabin’s flights of fancy, and a dash of virtuoso fireworks to conclude. Though he is an admirer of the master, and even... Read more... |
Boxing DayTuesday, 18 December 2012
You don’t need to know that Bernard Rose’s Boxing Day is an adaptation of the Tolstoy story Master and Man, but it does help - somewhat. You may well know it anyway, given that it’s the third film in a loose series that Rose started just more than a... Read more... |
Galina Vishnevskaya on Britten and his War RequiemFriday, 14 December 2012
One of Russia’s greatest and most inspirational sopranos, Galina Vishnevskaya died on 11 December at the age of 86. To the world at large, she will probably be most famous for taking an heroic stand alongside her husband, cellist and conductor... Read more... |
CD: Motorama - CalendarSaturday, 08 December 2012
A little-known fact about reality, seldom touched upon by quantum physicists in recent years, is that there’s a wormhole between Manchester in September 1981 and the far western Russian port city of Rostov-on-Don in the present. This would seem to... Read more... |
A Young Doctor's Notebook, Sky Arts 1Thursday, 06 December 2012
Bulgakov gets about more than you’d think. As a character in the play Collaborators, the Russian novelist was most recently seen helping Stalin with his memoirs. Within the last couple of years his novels The Master and Margarita and The White Guard... Read more... |
