Russia
Ismene Brown
Even by the grand Guignol standards of Russian ballet 2013, this week has been eventful. The trial of the Bolshoi dancer for attacking his boss with acid finally began on Tuesday, and with incredible, tension-ratcheting synchrony, the controversial, mouthy Bolshoi star who was fired in the summer for machinating against his leaders has been appointed to head Russia's world-famous ballet school.To add still more salt to the seasoning, the same mouthy Bolshoi star will be appearing - it was revealed on Tuesday - as a witness on behalf of the accused dancer in the trial. The Brooks-Coulson Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Respect and dignity, intolerance and hatred: the poles were set far apart in Stephen Fry: Out There. It’s good to have Fry the thoughtful presenter back – it’s been a long time since his The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive – on a subject close to his heart, how gay people are faring in various parts of the world. This first episode took us to Uganda and Los Angeles, while part two on Wednesday drops in on Brazil, Russia and India. Quite an itinerary for two hours of television – fitted in over two years, during gaps in Fry’s other commitments – and it’s to Fergus O’Brien’s directing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a great line near the beginning of Fox’s nine-parter Meet the Russians: “Money can’t buy you taste. It can buy you a personal shopper.” If this show's participants had splashed out on a bit of PR advice as well, you wonder whether the answer would have come back to steer clear of such television exposure, even when Fox came knocking. Not because there are any dreadful secrets to be found in those ample closets – unless you count some of the interior design – but because the result makes them look a bit like they’re out of a bad soap.It’s all so easy to mock. Just as it’s easy to Read more ...
simon.broughton
“Some say that I come from Russia / Some think that I come from Africa / But I'm so exotic, I'm so erotic / 'Cos I come from the Planet Paprika...” So sang Shantel at the close of the first WOMAD festival in Russia. The location was almost as exotic as Planet Paprika – the town of Pyatigorsk, 1,500 kilometres from Moscow, deep in the south of Russia in the North Caucasus region. Bringing WOMAD here is part of a cultural regeneration of a region which has the spectacular natural beauty of the Caucasus mountains, but uncomfortable associations of tension and conflict. The North Caucasus Read more ...
David Nice
What is the extraordinary, crowd-drawing appeal of a picture collection reunited, for a short time only, with its original surroundings? Well, for a start, this is no modest assembly of old masters, and Houghton Hall's elaborately crafted ensemble rooms constitute no conventional stately home. The feat of remarrying them has been so successful that Houghton Revisited has been extended for another two months, until 24 November.Clearly following in the rear of fashionable London, most of which seems already to have zipped to north Norfolk to see the wonders, I arrived from King's Lynn last Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Once you’d got over an initial sense of absurdity at Vinnie Jones as travel guide, to Russia and for National Geographic to boot, a certain logic kicked in: hard country, hard man. Some time after we'd lost count in Vinnie Jones: Russia’s Toughest of how often our guide had described himself as "football hard man and Hollywood tough guy”, something unfamiliar crept into view, namely an element of humility in the face of challenges that boggled the Jones imagination. Thankfully for all concerned, they were later left to those who knew how to cope with them better.Could Jones take us to parts Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa recently made an impact with the powerful In the Fog, a delicately balanced examination of the pressures at play in World War II Russia. Before that, his international calling card was My Joy (2010), a first venture into fiction. Both form part of a prodigious body of work otherwise dedicated to non-fiction. The release of the documentaries Blockade, Landscape and Revue in one package gives non-Russians a first chance to sample what dominates his output.Blockade (2006) takes archive footage of the Leningrad Blockade of 1941 to 1944, when the city was Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias and joining him was the Milanese orchestra bearing the composer’s name. Calleja’s growing legions of fans were much in evidence, of course, more Maltese than Italian flags, but what can they have made of the music stand which came between them and their hero? Five arias, one of which he will have sung a zillion times, and still – despite the presence of TV cameras – the music was Read more ...
fisun.guner
Fall of Eagles, a 13-part series which combines history and lavish costume drama, was first broadcast in the same year as The World at War. But while one continues to be seen as landmark television 40 years after it hit our small screens, I vouch that few have heard of the BBC's Fall of Eagles. Both productions at any rate testify to a time when broadcasters were not afraid of length (Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews, currently on BBC Two, seems to defy what has become the usual three-part BBC format with its five episodes).Though half the length of The World at War, Thames Television's Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra made quite a splash with their Tchaikovsky symphony series under Mariss Jansons back in the 1980s. The watchwords then were freshness and articulation, a re-establishment of Tchaikovsky’s innate classicism - and so it was again as Vasily Petrenko stepped out as the orchestra’s new Chief Conductor. The opening of Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony sounded so light and articulate, so suggestive of clean, icy cold air, and the clarity that brings that the subtitle “Winter Daydreams” suddenly seemed a little vague.When Petrenko’s poetic first clarinetist eased us into Read more ...
David Nice
Prokofiev’s Fifth is a symphony for which the conductor’s setting tends to be turned to either bright and light or dark and heavy. Perhaps because of the composer’s perceived joker role as set against Shostakovich the symphonic chronicler of Soviet tragedy, Vassily Sinaisky at the 2005 Proms made a glib, glossy showpiece of it. Valery Gergiev has always veered to the black side. But last night Yannick Nézet-Séguin worked sympathetically with the humane inscaping of the orchestra Gergiev did so much to mould, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, to give the best of all possible worlds, emphasising the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Bolshoi left it till last to be most itself, to dance a ballet that is truly of its blood, its seed - its closing on Alexei Ratmansky's The Flames of Paris will leave much happiness in the memory to override the problematic productions of classics, the unidiomatic Balanchine and the awful backstage events. Here at last, in a work by the most gifted of recent Bolshoi directors, you met on stage young people who dance, who act, who love the theatre, fresh in their performing, skilled in their means, open-hearted in reaching the audience, and loved right back.The previous night the visiting Read more ...