Siberia
Frances Larson: Undreamed Shores review - journeys without mapsTuesday, 02 March 2021
Beatrice Blackwood had lived in a clifftop village between surf and jungle on Bougainville Island, part of the Solomon archipelago in the South Pacific. She hunted, fished and grew crops with local people as she studied their social and sexual lives... Read more... |
Sophy Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia review - a distant musical journeySunday, 09 February 2020
For travellers, “music is a passport, especially in Russia…” Borrowing an adage from the British diplomat Thomas Preston, Sophy Roberts could be speaking about the eccentric quest that lies behind The Lost Pianos of Siberia. Preston, as consul in... Read more... |
Nikolai Lugansky / Pavel Kolesnikov, Wigmore Hall review - lucidity and depth from two master pianistsTuesday, 01 May 2018
Reaching for philosophical terms seems appropriate enough for two deep thinkers among Russian pianists (strictly speaking, Kolesnikov is Siberian-born, London-based). In what Kant defined as the phenomenal world, the tangible circumstances, there... Read more... |
Big Cats, BBC One review - how cats conquered the worldFriday, 12 January 2018
Accepted wisdom seemed to be that in the animal world rats and cockroaches were the most adaptable and the most widely geographically distributed, followed by those pesky humans. But think again: the premise in this new three-part series is that the... Read more... |
Remembering Dmitri Hvorostovsky (1962-2017)Friday, 24 November 2017
A certain online scandalmonger and coffin-chaser likes to preface news of deaths in the musical world with "sadness" or "tragedy", usually when neither he nor we have heard of the person in question. But the end of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's two-and-a-... Read more... |
From the House of the Dead, Welsh National Opera review - elderly staging, music comes up freshMonday, 09 October 2017
This week is Prison Week in the Christian Churches, and it would be nice, if fanciful, to think that WNO programmed their revival of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead with that in mind. More likely the thinking was that it fitted well enough into... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: violinist Vadim RepinSaturday, 22 February 2014
When I last saw Vadim Repin in action, he was premiering a work of terrific energy and invention which is here to stay, James MacMillan's Violin Concerto. Tonight in Birmingham and on Monday at the Royal Festival Hall he is back on familiar... Read more... |
Girl ModelWednesday, 08 February 2012
American documentary directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin have made a reputation with stories that study, as they describe it, “variations of truth and falseness”. Their latest, Girl Model, is just that, in spades. It tells the story of 13-year-... Read more... |
From the House of the Dead, Opera NorthFriday, 06 May 2011
Janáček’s stark Prelude is a stunner: there’s no conventional beginning, no conventional thematic development; it simply starts, as if a light switch has been flicked on, and the baleful opening theme is distorted, repeated, squeezed until it leads... Read more... |
Giselle, Royal Ballet/ Swan Lake, Russian State Ballet of SiberiaWednesday, 12 January 2011
The chasm between the top-class ballet available to London-area ballet-goers and the low-grade stuff peddled in the regions is the field where the battle to save ballet’s soul is nightly won or lost. Nothing could be more dispiriting than to see the... Read more... |
Darren Almond: The Principle of Moments, White Cube Mason's YardFriday, 10 September 2010
Darren Almond’s ongoing fascination with far-flung places where extreme weather conditions prevail provides the inspiration for his current show at White Cube. The Principle of Moments consists of over 10,000 tiny photographs cataloguing the ever-... Read more... |
