Russia
theartsdesk in Siberia: Cold Comfort KrasnoyarskSunday, 28 November 2010
In England you may joke about having Siberian weather with minus 7 degrees. This is really what Siberian winter looks like - at minus 26 degrees. The river is gushing steam, a hellishly peculiar sight. After travelling for 16 hours and through seven... Read more... |
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko, Royal Festival HallThursday, 25 November 2010
That in itself was enough to tell us that Petrenko isn’t just a supremely elegant conductor, an easy stylist able to make Stravinsky’s fiddly early Scherzo fantastique sound natural and to paper over the cracks of a tottering soloist, Oleg Marshev,... Read more... |
Simon McBurney On Creating A Dog's HeartMonday, 22 November 2010
For anyone who grew up in the former Soviet Union, Heart of a Dog is a seminal text. But it’s also in the great tradition of Gogol and all the Russian satirists. It springs out into absolutely delicious flights of fantasy, but really sharp-edged.... Read more... |
Apollo's Angels: A History of BalletSunday, 21 November 2010
It is rare that you read a book, and mentally shout “Yes! Yes!” as you tick off all the things you agree with, but had never actually verbalised. It is even rarer to read a book where, in a subject you know pretty well, on almost every page you... Read more... |
A Dog's Heart, English National OperaSunday, 21 November 2010
From discreetly poisoned violets at Covent Garden to buckets of man-dog blood in St Martin’s Lane has been quite a leap this week. True, the bourgeois plastic surgeon of Mikhail Bulgakov’s scabrous, long-suppressed 1925 novella goes about singing... Read more... |
Mustonen, London Symphony Orchestra, Gergiev, Barbican HallSaturday, 20 November 2010
Because it was the capricious Finn who got us going and provided us with the evening's only chunks of nourishment. His performance of Rodion Shchedrin's Fourth Piano Concerto was joyous and thrilling. I wasn't expecting a great deal from Shchedrin... Read more... |
Remembering a great ProkofievianWednesday, 17 November 2010
She did more to make Prokofiev remembered and reassessed than most of the great performers. Noëlle Mann, who died earlier this year from cancer at the age of 63, was the doyenne of Prokofiev studies: vivacious guardian of the Prokofiev Archive at... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Yasnaya Polyana: The Lost Centenary of Tolstoy's DeathSunday, 14 November 2010
Russia marks the centenary of the death of Leo Tolstoy on 20 November – but the level of local tribute to one of the country’s greatest writers seems markedly muted for a figure two of whose novels, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, are regularly... Read more... |
Alexander Ponomarev: Sea Stories, Calvert 22Friday, 08 October 2010
As well as being a great artist, Leonardo da Vinci designed machine guns, tanks and cluster bombs and worked out how to build a submarine; but so appalled was he by the potential of this last invention that he coded his notes to prevent anyone using... Read more... |
Matsuev, London Symphony Orchestra, Gergiev, Barbican HallSunday, 26 September 2010
Shchedrin's best works, in my experience - and his output has been prolific of late - colour and treat the themes of others: chastushki or Russian street songs in the brilliant Naughty Limericks Concerto (to be heard in the second programme of the... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Composer Rodion ShchedrinSaturday, 18 September 2010
The Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin has long been damned faintly by two facts - that he is the husband of the Bolshoi prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and that he was for a long time the president of the Russian Composers' Union in the USSR. These... Read more... |
My Summer Reading: Author Tibor FischerMonday, 06 September 2010
Born in Stockport in 1959, Tibor Fischer is the son of two Hungarian basketball players who fled their homeland during the 1956 revolution; his 1992 Booker-nominated debut novel, Under the Frog, revisited this subject in wonderfully fleshy, blackly... Read more... |
