Russia
Tom Birchenough
The latest in a long tradition of Russian Second World War films, Sergei Mokritsky’s Battle for Sevastopol itself emerged out of conflict. Initiated as a "status" joint project between Russia and Ukraine well before relations between those two countries soured, production continued despite the rift that deepened between them. The film premiered in both on the same day in April 2015, earning considerable – and equal – box office success on both sides of a border riven by war.It’s also that rare thing, a Russian-language mainstream film that has the potential to travel beyond its original Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The 30th anniversary of the death of Andrei Tarkovsky – the great Russian director died just before the end of 1986, on December 29, in Paris – will surely guarantee that his remarkable body of work receives new attention, and this month distributor Artificial Eye launches a programme, Sculpting Time, which will see new digitally restored versions of his seven films being re-released around the country. Tarkovsky is certainly not a figure whose reputation has ever fallen away, but it’s as appropriate a moment as any to reconsider his extraordinary talent, not least with the images of his work Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is an unashamed, fulsome, extravagant tribute from Peter Greenaway to his cinema idol. The British director – though that description is probably more point of origin these days than allegiance – has long acclaimed his Russian-Soviet counterpart Sergei Eisenstein as the most adventurous figure that the film industry has ever known, one whose ground-breaking experiments and discoveries are as alive today as they ever have been.There’s experiment aplenty in Eisenstein in Guanajuato, making the result much more of a fiesta than we have had from the director in a long time; the energy levels Read more ...
David Nice
Cherrypicking from 17 concerts to come up with the one by last year's Leeds International Piano Competition winner may seem a bit unfair to the French Institute's ever more ambitious annual It's All About Piano! Festival. It was hard, for instance, to miss out on the youth element, the Satie bookending the weekend's events, or for that matter the absolute star of the festival two years ago, David Kadouch, who then gave one of the best, and most intriguingly programmed, recitals I've ever heard and teamed up for a Saturday night duo recital with Adam Laloum. Let's just say that the alternative Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A good half of the portraits in Russia and the Arts are of figures without whom any conception of 19th century European culture would be incomplete. A felicitous subtitle, “The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky”, provides a natural, even easy point of orientation for those approaching Russian culture, and with it the country’s history and character, without particular advance knowledge.Much is new here, not least the artists themselves, none of whose names are anywhere near as well-known as their subjects. The wider intellectual world they inhabited may seem remote, with its conflicts between Read more ...
David Nice
Russian bells and spinning tops dominate Richard Jones's predictably unpredictable take on Musorgsky's saga of a conscience-stricken Tsar. Latter-day purism tends to insist on the composer's seven-scene 1869 original – possibly for economic more than artistic reasons – and this two-hour-plus, interval-free whizz through seven years of Russian history is the most faithful to the first score I've heard. It's also a first for the Royal Opera, which has preferred the much longer, so-called 'supersaturated' combination of two versions in its long-running Tarkovsky production preceding Jones's. Read more ...
David Nice
London has been missing out on Boris Giltburg for too long. He's been playing Shostakovich concertos back to back with Petrenko in Liverpool, and the big Rachmaninov works up in Scotland (see theartsdesk's review today of the latest Royal Scottish National Orchestra programme). But like his similarly Russian-born peers – take your pick of a favourite among Yevgeny Subdin, Daniil Trifonov, Rustem Hayroudinoff, Nikolay Lugansky, Alexander Melnikov and Dennis Kozhukhin – the 32-year-old Israeli-based pianist unleashes astonishing stamina and intellect in cleverly-concocted recital programmes; we Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The second album by Russian shoegazers Pinkshinyultrablast neatly side-steps any language-barrier issues either by submerging their mono-monikered singer Lyubov’s voice into their sea of noise, or ensuring that what is heard could be wordless singing along the lines of The Swingle Singers – even though she sings in English. As it should be with music so much about texture, the sound of Pinkshinyultrablast marks them as virtuosos of the indirect.However, where they draw from is clear. As it was with their debut album, 2015’s Everything Else Matters, Cocteau Twins, Lush, Slowdive and, of course Read more ...
David Nice
What fun it must have been to attend any of the St Petersburg Free Music School concerts during the second half of the 19th century. Balakirev, idiosyncratic mentor of the group briefly together as the "Mighty Handful", and his acolytes – Borodin, Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and the one we usually don't mention, César Cui – would have had orchestral works and sometimes the odd aria from an opera-in-progress on the programme, often alongside music by their western idols Berlioz, Liszt and Schumann. If something wasn't ready, which was often the case, colleagues would help out or offer a Read more ...
David Nice
At the end of Episode Five, Brian Cox's savvy old Field-Marshal Kutuzov gave the order to retreat and abandon Moscow, with hardly a hint of Tolstoy's council of war. That left the final hour and 20 minutes to wrap up the burning of Russia's sacred capital, Pierre's capture by the French and his best shot at the meaning of life through the peasant Platon Karatayev, Natasha's reconciliation with the wounded Andrei, the French retreat dogged by partisan attacks and then all the other loose ends. A mere 350 pages of novel, in short, not counting Tolstoy's final disquisition on the nature of war Read more ...
David Nice
Risk-taking is what gives so many of Vladimir Jurowski's concerts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra their special savour. But did two risks for last night's programme pay off? I was as excited as many Russians and hardcore Russophiles at the rare visit of legendary 73-year-old cellist Natalia Gutman, and it could only be interesting to hear the little-heard, hour-long first version of Bruckner's Third Symphony. But interesting, with a few flashes of inspiration, was as far as it went in both cases.Gutman's recording of the two Shostakovich Cello Concertos is up there with the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Georgian director Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines made the shortlist of five for last year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar category (it didn't win). It was nominated from Georgia, but could equally well have represented Estonia: this incrementally powerful anti-war film is that rarest of things, a co-production between two rather different countries with a story that draws genuinely on the worlds of both.The consequences – human, most of all – of the break-up of the Soviet Union as it accelerated through the second half of 1991 haven’t been reflected all that widely in cinema, and Tangerines is Read more ...