Russia
Tom Birchenough
Give any masterpiece of classical music a central role in a film - and everything else straightaway faces the highest standards of comparison. In Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert, it's the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and from the opening frames the music delivers everything it should – though whether it’s enough to hide other noises (clunking in the script department being only one of them) is another matter.First-half depictions of contemporary Russia work more assuredly on the comedy front, even if this concert’s brand of humour quickly slips considerably south of Moscow to lodge somewhere in 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 ...
Ismene Brown
The Royal Opera House ticketline is taking a while to catch up - last Friday's Moscow castings are now confirmed in London - but various inconsistencies are cropping up. The full confirmed casting list is below.While it is a fact of life that dancer injury causes unavoidable cast changes, and Zakharova had suffered a hip injury earlier in the year as well, the scale of this last-minute remake of the tour is likely to cause fury among London ticket-buyers, who were booking up until this week for specific casts that the Bolshoi management at least knew last Friday were not appearing. Few of the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
One of the greatest pianists (and latterly conductors) of his generation, founder and artistic director of the Russian National Orchestra, Mikhail Pletnev, has been charged by Thai police with raping a 14-year-old boy, according to the BBC. Police also raided his Thai home in connection with a paedophile ring and found, say prosecutors, several "compromising" photographs with underage boys.Extraordinary. Echoes of conductor Robert King, who was convicted of sexually assaulting five minors a few years back, who is making his British comeback this year at the Wigmore Hall. Pletnev will no doubt Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Note to lovers of those periodic lists of all-time international cultural landmarks: I seem to remember that Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth once came in at number 82 in one such “best films ever” critical appraisal. Though that may place it somewhere in the lower third division, its release on the Mr Bongo label is a very welcome event if, like me, you probably last saw it decades ago on a bad 16-mm copy. It comes trumpeted as fully restored, in the full (that is, uncensored) version, complete with a stunning score that has an effect almost comparable to that of the images themselves. It's an Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Great excitement at the Artes Mundi Awards in Cardiff’s National Museum last night as the UK’s largest cash prize for the winner of any UK contemporary art competition - a staggering £40,000 - was presented to the Israeli artist Yael Bartana. Two hours before the announcement, the judges were still undecided but the white smoke moment saw Bartana’s two films (part of an ongoing trilogy) land the cheque.Like many of the 500 contenders, Bartana works with documentary film. She applies it to interesting challenges to the meaning of Zionism today and plays with the idea of returning Polish Jews 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 ...
Ismene Brown
"Russia has a remarkable and ancient tradition of wooden buildings that dates back to the tenth century, with the remains of Medieval fortresses demonstrating the sophistication of the Nordic wooden construction methods employed across Russia and Scandinavia at the time. In the 18th century Peter the Great’s policy of broader cultural engagement between Russia and the rest of Europe stimulated cultural influence both to and from Russia, finding its way into the rich urban and architectural language of the time. Rather than destroying local traditions - which has happened with the prevalence Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Vladimir Story's 1917 brochure for patterns for building Russia's traditional wooden country houses - called dachas - has been rescued from oblivion by the chance discovery of an ancient copy of it in Georgia. Now reprinted, The Art Nouveau Dacha: designs by Vladimir Story reveals with marvellous detail a unique house-building tradition full of details and requirements that are as modern nearly a century later. Read the story of this book in theartsdesk's Books/Art section, and enjoy a selection of reproductions from everything from a grand "English-style" mansion to a whimsical little Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It takes a particular talent to poke fun at the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, a conflict that cost millions of lives and led to one of the most brutal regimes in modern history. But Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, which he later turned into a play and is presented at the Lyttelton Theatre in a new version by Andrew Upton, does just that. It’s a big, rambling, sometimes confusing affair that dips into farce, but one that remains entirely gripping throughout its two hours and 40 minutes.Bulgakov's play (being given only its third UK production) completes a trilogy of early Soviet adaptations Read more ...
simon.broughton
When I was asked 12 months ago by the BBC if I’d be interested in making a film on Henryk Górecki (in Poland) and Arvo Pärt (in Estonia) for their Sacred Music series, I said yes, almost immediately. I’d been very impressed by the first series and liked the idea pairing of two composers writing religious music in the communist Eastern Bloc who have become almost cult figures in our secular age. Górecki became the fastest-selling living classical composer when Nonesuch’s recording of his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw, was championed by the just-launched Read more ...
sue.steward
A 1986 documentary about the USSR’s new modernist city, Chernobyl, featured a five-year-old boy kicking a football through landscaped gardens, past blocks of clean, elegant flats and inside the soon-to-be opened funfair in the workers' town of Pripyat. A brilliant propaganda tool for the new status symbol Nuclear Power Plant, the film was intended to convey the message around the Soviet empire that the nuclear age implied a safe, happy future. The film was never shown; three weeks later, the plant exploded in the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster and Chernobyl’s almost 40,000 inhabitants Read more ...