Russia
David Nice
Two hundred costumes, over 60 solo roles and the world premiere of a great operatic composer's first thoughts: it's a task which would daunt the best-resourced opera company in the world. The fact that Prokofiev's initial, 11-scene meditation on Tolstoy's War and Peace was launched last night by students with slow-burn but ultimately total confidence, an orchestral collaboration with established professionals and a fusion of production with design at the very highest level could only send us out in to the streets of Glasgow echoing the Russian soldiers' final cries of "Ura!"The most Read more ...
michael.pennington
The Russians have always been good at writers' houses. The Soviets especially. When I first saw Tolstoy's house his blue smock was hanging behind the door, a manuscript was on his desk but the chair pushed back as if he'd nipped out for a moment and would be back. It was a frankly theatrical effect and the better for it. Like Tolstoy’s, Chekhov's two houses - one in Melikhovo near Moscow and the other in Yalta in the south - were well funded and maintained and imaginatively presented in those days. Only the last is true now.When I went to Melikhovo in 1997 it was in the hands of dedicated Read more ...
michael.pennington
In a life so short it is always a shock to remember the fact. Chekhov lost more friends than most people do by 60, but he has gained hundreds of thousands who love that fugitive figure, its guardedly attentive attitude, the merciless word in the right place, the moral force lightly carried: one thinks of him in the most unexpected corners of life.Unavailable to account for himself, he has become the invention of his admirers, who may prefer him wary or exuberant, skittishly lyrical, coldly severe, charming or implacable, walking like a girl or tough as old boots. Some get excited by the new Read more ...
josh.spero
If Andrew Graham-Dixon's arts career ever goes belly-up, there is surely a microphone with his name on it at Radio 4, so warm and confident and trustworthy is his voice. Judging, however, by his new three-part programme on BBC Four, The Art of Russia, there is no chance of this happening soon.The first episode is entitled "Out of the Forest", describing how the Russian people under Ivan the Terrible emerged from their wooded subjugation by the Mongols, but the story Graham-Dixon starts with - how they got there in the first place and how they survived - is at least as interesting.It was - as Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Piano ballades and fantasies are the repositories of dreams. They are the places where the mind is left to wander, to roam precipitously, unaided by known paths, undisturbed by familiar structures. The romantic fantasies and ballades of last night's Wigmore Hall recital plunge and soar, catch you by the feet and dangle you by the ankles. To cast the right spell, to heave the right ho, you need the right storyteller, one like the ancient Mariner: a glittering eye, a hoary beard, a man of myth and terror. In fact, you need what we got: the towering Paul Bunyan-like Russian, Nikolai Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Elisabeth Leonskaja, who turned 64 on Sunday, is one of the last links to a grand school of Russian pianism where technique meant the marshalling of piano possibilities into a positively orchestral array of expressive means. Often noted in harness with Sviatoslav Richter, with whom she frequently played, Leonskaja deserves renown of her own. Her all-Chopin recital last night at the Wigmore Hall had a splendour and focus that was truly of the Russian tradition, fervent in feeling, masterly in discipline, a serious line in beauty.All-Chopin programmes aren’t that common, surprisingly, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A delicious new treat is promised at The Royal Opera House for Christmas: a comic opera by Tchaikovsky that brings the wit and fun of a Russian magical folk tale to the stage in a staging of rare opulence. A story of turbulent love, magical rides through the sky with the Devil, and an impossible task - to get a peasant girl a pair of Catherine the Great's slippers - The Tsarina's Slippers has ballets and Cossack dancing as well as a host of singing characters.Director Francesca Zambello, costume designer Tatiana Noginova and choreographer Alastair Marriott here reveal their preparations, and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new production by The Royal Opera of Tchaikovsky's The Tsarina's Slippers opens on Friday at Covent Garden, directed by Francesca Zambello, designed by Mikhail Mokrov and Tatiana Noginova, and with an all-Russian cast of principals conducted by Alexandr Polianichko. Read Ismene Brown's interviews with the creative team elsewhere, and enjoy this feast of design models, costume sketches and production photographs.Click on a picture to enter full view and the slideshow.Sets by Mikhail Mokrov[bg|/OPERA/ismene_brown/tsarinas_slippers/sets]Costume designs by Tatiana NoginovaCharacters: Vakula, a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of series seven, our tight-lipped MI5 squad risked designer shoe leather and impeccable coiffure to defuse a Russian atom bomb in London, and their boss Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) was kidnapped by dubious Russian agent Viktor Sarkisian. Hence series eight began with the hunt for Harry, whisked (unbeknown to his underlings, who expressed their concern by smiling even less than usual) by helicopter to a mansion in “Moscow on Thames”.One assumed that Harry would in due course be restored to his futuristic glass-panelled office, where he likes to drink whisky and reflect on the deaths Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Rubies is a ballet for a girl comfortable with her curves, who can slink her hips and tip her bottom and relish seeing the men’s eyes widen. That the said girl is a ballerina, for whom curves are usually anathema, shows the personality challenge that this snazzy, jazzy George Balanchine ballet sets to its leading lady.That Sophie Martin, Scottish Ballet’s French leading lady, had enough personality to suggest Bette Midler curves, despite her refined build, is a measure of what fun she was to watch when the company hit Sadler’s Wells last night.Musical values were good, with Stravinsky, Berio Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Was he the prodigal son who abandoned Russia? Or the figure who did more than anyone to integrate Russian and European culture in the first half of the last century? As two major exhibitions open on the heritage of Sergei Diaghilev, celebrated impresario and “20th-century Medici”, for the first time Russians will have the chance to decide for themselves.It is the centenary of the first performances by the Ballets Russes in Paris, as well as the 80th anniversary of the death of the company’s no less legendary founder, and exhibitions marking his extraordinary creative achievements have been on Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When Carlos Acosta danced Spartacus with the Bolshoi Ballet in London in 2007, the man, the time and the place united the strands of a most extraordinary story in ballet, a story of peregrination, of dreadful reverses, of the pursuit of civilisation, of holding on to the best of human values in despairing times.This might, yes, describe Acosta’s own story (captivatingly told in his new memoir No Way Home, HarperPress) - but there is a more epic tale at issue here. It is the story of a dynasty of very great teachers and performers, the Messerers of Moscow.From Russia to Cuba, from London to Read more ...