Russia
Thomas H. Green
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 be the only explanation for Motorama. Their sound has been transported intact directly from the era of producers such as Martin Hannett, a deliciously warm amalgam of early New Order and The Chameleons with a honey-sweet trimming of Orange Juice’s pop sensibility (although, admittedly, the latter hailed from Glasgow, the curveball in this theory). Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 have both been adapted for the stage, while A Dog’s Heart was turned into an opera. All of these works were imbued with the Bulgakovian scent for phantasmal satire. So what's next for an author hooked on shape-shifting and the surreal?Don’t run a mile quite yet, but his memoir of serving as a young doctor in rural Ukraine has been turned into a Read more ...
David Nice
Her Majesty was making a rare concert-hall appearance to present the Queen’s Medal for Music, and any little Englanders in the audience might have been tempted to link royalty to Elgar’s Enigma Variations. But conductor Robin Ticciati, with a generosity and wisdom beyond his 29 years, raised this orchestral masterpiece to the universal level it deserves. Elgar’s "friends pictured within" trod air and revealed every aspect of their often shy, beautiful souls.It should come as no surprise that the score transcends labels of nationality, provinciality even. After all, what is "Nimrod" but the Read more ...
David Nice
There are always risks involved in the uncompromising side of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s family-friendly concerts. Succulent slices of fox-meat in the form of a suite from Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen gave the kids a nourishing start, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was always going to seduce them with her effervescent narrative, especially given Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša’s youthful instincts to paint big, bold pictures. But would they sit still through the thrashes and mystic meditations of the latest BBC commission, composer-pianist Rolf Hind’s The Tiniest House of Time?Fellow Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An expert cast delivers on their promise in Aleksei Arbuzov's triangular Russian drama from 1965 of the same name, which offers up war and peace and the shifting tides of love. There's so much of the last, in fact, that Alex Sims's production at times plays out like Design For Living set against a soundscape of shelling and the occasional nod to Hitler and Stalin. Spanning more than 17 years in the lives of two men and a woman who survive the ravages of war only to face the separate ambush that comes with passion, the play transcends its soupier soap operatics thanks chiefly to the Read more ...
David Nice
Hot on the heels of the latest English uncle over at the Vaudeville comes Dyadya Vanya from Moscow, bringing with it no samovar or old lace. Rimas Tuminas, the Vakhtangov Theatre's artistic director since 2007, has chucked out the Stanislavsky tradition of Chekhovian naturalism and in his own singular attempt to render what he thinks the characters feel as well as say serves up a stylised ritual that nearly suffocates the humanity of the drama.There's no problem in daring a radical re-think: Benedict Andrews's contemporary take on Three Sisters at the Young Vic mostly made sense on its own Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
The Russians are coming next week, when the Moscow company Vakhtangov bring their production of Anton Chekhov’s tragi-comic drama of dissipated lives and squandered love to the West End. But first, London has Linsday Posner’s staging, with a mouthwatering cast and a poised, ruefully witty translation by Christopher Hampton.There’s nothing here to startle, and in some ways that’s rather to the endeavour’s detriment. Christopher Oram’s set, of a timbered dacha that vaguely resembles a giant Swiss cuckoo clock, is so hefty and literal that in the opening scene it seems on the verge of crushing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Internationally he may be Russia's best-known film director, but Alexander Sokurov’s fame - his unique single-frame Russian Ark from 2002 aside - hasn’t travelled as widely as it might. Critical reaction has often been mixed, but at least the majority of his main films from the last two decades are available outside his homeland.This Artificial Eye collection brings a welcome couple from the very end of the 1980s (without any extras, however). Both are from scripts by Yury Arabov, Sokurov’s most frequent collaborator, and are simultaneously mesmeric and challenging to watch, their intensity Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Elena is a story of two households, two families each unhappy in their own ways. Linking them is the title character (played by Nadezhda Markina, outstanding in a screen role that could have been written for her) who moves between two very different worlds that both speak truthfully about contemporary Russia. Zvyagintsev has changed tone from his more philosophical festival-winners The Return and The Banishment, but the sheer visual mastery of those two remains central in this film where family tension is more down to earth.The director has worked throughout his career with cinematographer Read more ...
David Nice
Can two half-orchestras playing together ever be better than one well-established organism? The second and third concerts in yet another special project masterminded by Vladimir Jurowski, drawing together British and Russian perspectives on war and peace, proved that they could. It may have been disappointing to find the Russian National Orchestra on Thursday evening launching so cold-bloodedly into the feral start of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony. But when many of their key players upped their game by joining colleagues from the London Philharmonic Orchestra the following evening in Read more ...
David Nice
Somehow the manic cry of “Scooby-Doo man!” from the back of the stalls didn’t seem too incongruous. We were in the thick of Shostakovich’s craziest symphony, the Fourth, composed in the mid 1930s when such maverick Russian talent was about to be stamped on and potentially quite a sledgehammer of a season opener for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Instead dapper Jukka-Pekka Saraste - a more than satisfactory replacement for the great Neeme Järvi - ran through this nightmarish world like an open razor, every cutting gesture aimed with deadly accuracy, having allocated the spiritual healing to a Read more ...
David Nice
What, another review of an LPO/Jurowski concert in less than a week? Reasoning the need, it only has to be said that other orchestras may kick off their seasons by mixing the unfamiliar with core repertoire, but none would dare launch with not one but two programmes featuring this only-connect kind of singularity (and more to come in the “War and Peace” series next week). Last night the known quantity of Rachmaninov’s masterly choral symphony The Bells looked back to less familiar fare which shared two of its themes: the sounds of some very unorthodox tintinnabulations and the Russification Read more ...