Russia
Kieron Tyler
Krai – Край – is employed in Russia to label tracts of land separating regions or marking borders. These liminal places each have their own name, defined limits and character, and have inspired the second solo album by the Brooklyn-based Olga Bell. An exotic musical travelogue through the nine Krais, Krai the album is delivered entirely in Russian.The music shifts from minimally arranged pieces drawing from Troika to melodies which could suit the balalaika. Orthodox religious chanting sits alongside Cossack melodies and the drumming of the Arctic-region Chuchki. There’s electronics, Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Before Boris Eifman’s second visit to London this week, ballet lovers who missed the divisive Russian dancemaker last time round will have been weighing up the merits of a punt on a ticket. If they were basing their calculations on reviews, I imagine their mental reasoning went as follows. Against: Eifman’s ballets send many English-language dance critics into tail-spinning, virtuosic displays of vitriol (based on genuine dislike: Eifman makes one colleague “want to stand on her chair and howl.”) For: other critics like him; Russian audiences apparently love him. Plus, controversial might Read more ...
David Nice
Had this Moscow production any serious ideas in its head until its suddenly effective epilogue, much might have been pertinently said about an opera in which an imperialistic campaign ends in disaster, and where the Polovtsian “enemy” shows far more signs of a civilized life and wartime courtesy than the corrupt, crumbling court at home. Unfortunately veteran director Yuri Alexandrov’s very selective take on Borodin’s fitfully wondrous score asks for not a moment of dramatic truth from its principal singers: a great shame, because the voices are never less than stalwart, the chorus and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Tchaikovsky de nos jours, is Theodore Gumbril’s dismissal of Skryabin in Aldous Huxley’s Twenties novel Antic Hay. For some reason, Alexander Skryabin has suffered more than most from snap judgements of this kind. He has been the woolly theosophist, the vacuous, over-inflated mystifier, the effete, self-indulgent decorative – everything except the refined, disciplined creative genius. It’s high time these images were consigned to the rubbish dump of history, along with the dull-witted Bach, the mad Beethoven, and for that matter the slushy Tchaikovsky. Skryabin was a superior artist whose Read more ...
David Nice
Depth, height, breadth, a sense of the new and strange in three brilliantly-programmed works spanning just over a century: all these and a clarity in impassioned execution told us why the BBC Symphony Orchestra was inspired in choosing Finn Sakari Oramo as its principal conductor. Their anniversary journey through Nielsen’s symphonies next Barbican season – itself a heady mix announced amid the palms of the singular conservatory before a vintage assembly of performances around the Centre – is more fascinating in prospect, for me at any rate, than the promised visits of the New York and Berlin Read more ...
David Nice
Valery Gergiev once described Yevgeny Svetlanov’s USSR - later Russian - State Symphony Orchestra to me as “an orchestra with a voice”. Then Svetlanov died and the voice cracked. Which are the other big Russian personalities now? Gergiev’s own Mariinsky? I don’t hear it. Yuri Temirkanov can still bend the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra to his own whim of iron. The Russian National Orchestra was never in the running. But the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, to give its full title, still sounds as deep and rich as it did when I last heard it live nearly 30 years ago.You can Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
World War One overkill - if you'll pardon the expression - is a clear and present danger as the centenary commemorations gather pace, but this investigation of the roles of the interlinked royal families of Europe in the onrush of hostilities was as good a chunk of TV history as I can remember. Informative and detailed but always keeping an eye on the bigger picture, it made me, at any rate, start to think about the road to 1914 in a different light.The pivotal figure was Queen Victoria, whose influence we could see reaching far beyond the immense era named after her and onwards into the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The programme blurb says: “Dan Snow looks back at 90 years of the Winter Olympics and shows how the political upheaval of the 20th and 21st centuries has impacted on the Games". Instead we got a mish-mash of archive clips, a potted history of the Games, a nod to some of the politics surrounding them, and a tale of how one chap's derring-do impacted on them.The programme went all over the place – as did Snow, who travelled to several countries, most of them unnecessarily, to tell his story. The rugged historian, an amenable presenter, was, as ever, keen to show his action-man credentials by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Assuming you care at all, your favourite incarnation of Tom Clancy's industrious CIA agent Jack Ryan is probably Harrison Ford (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger). Before him came Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October, and afterwards there was Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears.But Affleck's Ryan was a dozen years ago, enough of a gap to give fresh-faced new boy Chris Pine (who has also rebooted Star Trek's Captain James T Kirk) some space to put his personal stamp on the role. This new episode is a kind of Ryan prequel, a story created by screenwriters Adam Cozad and David Koepp Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Russia is the largest country on earth, unimaginably vast. Its people naturally have a great attachment to their country – and its landscape – in spite of their turbulent history, and in the late 19th century painters portrayed with deep feeling their native environment, their feelings for the motherland perhaps intensified among the more sophisticated the more they had travelled and studied in Europe. One of their leaders was Ivan Shishkin,1832-1898, known as the patriarch of the forest, and head of the landscape school at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. Well-read and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s cruel comedy and human drama aplenty in Fortune’s Fool, so much so that it’s hard sometimes to know whether we’re watching farce or tragedy. But it’s a mixture that works well in Lucy Bailey’s production of Ivan Turgenev’s early play in this version by Mike Poulton, making its London debut at the Old Vic.Fortune’s Fool has a rather special history behind it. Poulton’s adaptation of Turgenev’s 1848 work was first seen in Chichester in 1996, to mixed critical reception. Thanks to Alan Bates, who had played the central role of the tragic Russian country estate hanger-on, Vasily Kuzovkin Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Money, love, professional jealousy - the three undying motives for personal crime, and all three were present in the Bolshoi Ballet acid trial. An international public that scoffed happily at the OTT ballet horror-show that was the film Black Swan was suddenly sobered up by real-life events that needed no cinematographers and screenwriters. A dancer had commissioned a criminal with a murder conviction to seriously hurt his boss, the artistic director of the great Bolshoi Ballet, Russia’s most glamorous, skilled and commercially desirable cultural export, and the boss was now scarred and near- Read more ...