St Petersburg
Ismene Brown
Confirmation today of the astonishing news from Russia - Nacho Duato will indeed become the new director of the Mikhailovsky Ballet, St Petersburg’s second company, from the New Year. The Spanish contemporary choreographer will be the first foreigner to lead a Russian ballet company for more than a century.The Mikhailovsky General Director, fruit tycoon Vladimir Kekhman, said at today's press conference in St Petersburg: "Engaging an internationally known choreographer in the prime of his strength and talents is incredibly significant not only for the Mikhailovsky Theatre, but for Russian Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Rape, marauding soldiers, peasants on the warpath and a flash hero - are we at the Bolshoi’s Spartacus once again? No, we’re at the Mikhailovsky Ballet down the road at the Coliseum where a rather more Erroll Flynn-type spectacle is being offered, Laurencia. This is a Soviet warhorse predating Grigorovich’s Spartacus by two decades, and with a much more 19th-century costume ballet feel to it, more of an alternative Don Quixote, with a bravura pair of leading roles and lashings of Spaniards and castanets.It’s set in Spain, based on Lope da Vega’s 17th-century peasant revenge tragedy Fuente Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Mikhailovsky Ballet is full of surprises. Predictably for a Russian company it brought a gala programme yesterday - unpredictably, it brought a rare example of St Petersburg 19th-century ballet comedy and a new commission of contemporary ballet. Neither of these is box office, so how refreshing is that? Then there were the thongs-and-glitter pas de deux of the strenuous 20th-century Soviet athletic style, and a classical jewel from Sleeping Beauty, and a wholly delightful court polonaise from a Glinka opera.
The combination generally made this show an eye-opener about the sheer babel of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It would be tough for any Russian ballet company to come into worldly, balletwise London just ahead of the great Bolshoi, but the Mikhailovsky Ballet make a very pleasing impression in their first week at the Coliseum with a pretty and historically interesting Swan Lake and a gently antique Giselle, and dancing that more than most underscores the rare pleasures of period style.The Swan Lake production is significant for both London and the Bolshoi, in fact, as it is a careful restaging of that 1956 version in which the Bolshoi made an indelible smash hit of their first trip here. Overtaken 40 Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You need very little for a Swan Lake. Tchaikovsky’s music, white swan-girls, a mooning boy, and 32 fouettés for the ballerina in black. That's about it, isn't it? Every traditional Swan Lake we see now is a sort of balletic pizza - a musical base scattered with ingredients collected from a familiar buffet, piled up by its stager or so-called choreographer according to taste (and often a large measure of vanity for sauce).For of all the classics, Swan Lake, the most immortal in imagery, is the most corruptible in choreography, the most fragile and most abused, its origins chequered and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Definitely no standard biopic, Russian director Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s A Room and a Half captures part of the life, and a great deal of the spirit, of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in a rare and rather brilliant gallimaufry of forms – from archive material (some of it skilfully doctored), via plentiful animation, to re-enactment scenes. It also catches the cultural milieu that formed the winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for literature, and the double city - Leningrad/St. Petersburg - of his birth.Brodsky was born there in 1940, and the film opens with the post-WWII return of his father, a Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The charismatic St Petersburg-born Vasily Petrenko has really been turning things around at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra since he took over as principal conductor in 2005. With both standards and audiences on the up he has embarked upon his first major recording project – to record all 15 Shostakovich symphonies for the Naxos label. The two previous releases have received tremendous notices and in this exclusive podcast he talks about the project in general and the latest release - the war-torn Eighth Symphony - in particular.Listen to this episode
Buy Vasily Petrenko's Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The charismatic St Petersburg-born Vasily Petrenko has really been turning things around at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra since he took over as Principal Conductor in 2005. With both standards and audiences on the up he has embarked upon his first major recording project – to record all 15 Shostakovich Symphonies for the Naxos label.Two releases are now available and in this exclusive podcast he talks to Edward Seckerson about the project in general and the symphonies in particular. The 11th “The Year 1905” makes extensive use of revolutionary songs and graphically portrays the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It is a curious feeling to go to meet a hated figure and find a delicate, blonde girl with a sweet face.On Monday, 23-year-old ballerina Alina Somova opens the batting for the legendary Mariinsky Ballet’s Covent Garden tour in Romeo and Juliet, needing to defy her critics who line up from West to East accusing her of vulgarising the majestic, poised St Petersburg style that defines classical ballet worldwide.Even for a ballerina, in an art where physical evolution seems to move twice as fast as anywhere else, Somova is peculiarly flexible. She throws her leg high over the vertical, even in a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If you tell a tall, whisper-slim young woman of 31 that she has been described as "the soul of Russia", it is understandable that she looks startled. Two huge, smoke-grey eyes cast a doubtful glance at me, and she murmurs in Russian. Her translator announces: "That is a very serious declaration."So it is. And yet Uliana Lopatkina, despite her tender age, is now lionised almost universally as the greatest ballerina today in Russia, a country where they know about such things. Effortlessly, it seems, in the 10 years since a 5ft 9in beanpole with a square jaw and an apparently boneless body Read more ...