St Petersburg
Matthew Paluch
The Mikhailovsky Ballet closed their epic two-week Coliseum season with modern works by their director, Nacho Duato, presumably hoping to display their capabilities at all dance forms. Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness is a work in two acts first created for the Weimar Arts Festival in 1999. Duato used Bach’s canon throughout, focusing on concertos and orchestral suites in the first part (14 pieces), and compositions for organ with further excerpts from The Art of Fugue in the second (seven pieces). The execution of the music by the Mikhailovsky orchestra under their musical Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Mikhailovsky Ballet's general director, Russia's fruit tycoon Vladimir Kekhman, may just have been declared bankrupt, but the company is pressing ahead with its star-studded London trip in March. Fraud investigators last week raided the offices of the Mikhailovsky, St Petersburg’s “other” company (ie, not the Mariinsky), looking for connections between Kekhman's business activities and the theatre. Nearly six years ago the "Banana King" became the 180-year-old theatre’s general director and donated a billion rubles to fix its crumbling walls and renovate its programme.But last Read more ...
judith.flanders
An apocryphal story tells of an awful theatrical adaptation of the story of Anne Frank. When the Nazis arrive to search the house where the family are in hiding, an enraged theatre-goer shouts, “She’s in the attic!” Well, I didn’t quite point Anna Karenina to the train station, but the thought crossed my mind.Boris Eifman has always divided the critics. Western audiences tend to respond the way they do to car crashes: they are appalled, but find it hard to look away. Russians, meanwhile, virtually stand on their seats and scream for more. Eifman, who since 1977 has run his own company in the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
No choreographer so divides American and British critics as Russia's only international dancemaker, Boris Eifman. He's "an amazing magician of the theatre", according to the late, great US critic Clive Barnes. He "flaunts all the worst clichés of psycho-sexo-bio-dance-drama with casual pride," according to the masterly New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay. Both views come from Englishmen working in America, hence a contradictory weathervane as to how his ballets will be received in Britain on this tour. Whichever side one comes down on (and one does, one does) what is undoubtedly Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bartók: Violin Concerto No 2, Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto Valeriy Sokolov Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich/David Zinman (Virgin)Bartók’s 1938 Violin Concerto No 2 seems to have garnered more respect than affection; it’s been overtaken in the 20th-century concerto popularity stakes by works by Shostakovich, Walton and Prokofiev. Which is such a shame, as it’s a glorious piece – one of those mature works where Bartók’s unique blend of folk music and Modernism find a perfect balance.Structurally it’s satisfying, its large-scale opening movement effectively reprised in dance form in the finale, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Nikolai Ge retrospective at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery marks the 180th anniversary of the artist’s birth – not the kind of round centenary or bicentenary landmark that often brings such projects to fruition. But the show is literally a revelation – at its centre are the religious works from the last years of his life, many of which returned only this year to Russia from abroad. A series of pencil drawings based on the Crucifixion show the artist working in a style that seems astonishingly ahead of his time.The last time I visited these exhibition halls, part of the Tretyakov’s “new” Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The bayadere bears on her shoulder a vase of holy water, and the story of the ballet La bayadère is of her refusal to compromise. She could better her life in two political deals: become the high priest’s mistress, or later, when bitten by a poisonous snake, take the antidote and live on while watching her sworn lover marry the princess who he knows tried to murder her. She refuses both. She remains, morally, the vessel of a purity that it would kill her spirit to give up.To stay so true to a principle isn’t only the stuff of fantastical ballet fairy tales. It has to be true of the Read more ...
judith.flanders
The Mariinsky Ballet has just completed a three-week season, with terrific highs (and the odd low). This was the 50th anniversary of the Mariinsky's (then Kirov's) first London visit, in 1961, and it is worth highlighting the role impresarios Victor and Lilian Hochhauser have played in the cultural life of London. They brought the Mariinsky to London in 1961, and, half a century later, they have once more given Londoners a summer of artistic richness, with 10 ballets, six choreographers and numerous casts. We owe a great deal to this extraordinary couple.So, to work.GREATEST THRILL: Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Great Mariinsky ballerinas are a breed apart, even from Bolshoi women. They take the stage with a consciousness of entitlement that’s thrilling to watch, and when this almost sacred sense of mystique and grace instilled in St Petersburg comes with vivid expressive distinction too, then there really is nothing like it. Even if three American 20th-century ballets might not be thought the likeliest territory to make such discoveries, what a night for ballerinas last night was. Viktoria Terëshkina and Alina Somova are on their way to joining the peerless Uliana Lopatkina at the high table.Maybe Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's 50 years since the mighty Kirov Ballet made their debut London tour - reeling from Nureyev's defection days before at the Paris airport. The tour was promoted by the unique impresarios of Soviet culture, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser. Half a century on, the pair are still indefatigably promoting the company, now named Mariinsky Ballet, whose season at Covent Garden opens on Monday, 25 July and runs to Saturday, 13 August.The St Petersburg company has been lying low while their Moscow rivals, the Bolshoi, made the Royal Opera House their summer home for the past few years - but it was only Read more ...
David Nice
White-knuckle crescendos loom large in that greater-than-ever conductor Neeme Järvi's spruce Indian summer. Short-term bursts were the chief payoff in tackling Dvořák's deceptively simple-seeming Serenade for Strings with a huge department on all too little rehearsal time, but they also helped to pave the way for the two big events in Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony: not just the infamous "invasion" sequence based on Ravel's Boléro, but above all the final slow burn. It was ultimately here that Järvi's mastery of the long, inward line showed us what creative conducting is all about. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
True to form the Mariinsky Ballet has already made programme changes for its Covent Garden visit next summer, not a fortnight after announcing its tour on 3 December. But we're used to it and it's all to the good. Substituting Don Quixote for the Lavrovsky Romeo and Juliet originally planned means a more traditional cast to the tour, a much more sure-fire box office, and a direct comparison between the St Petersburg virtuosos and their Moscow rivals at the Bolshoi who for the past two years have made Don Q their party piece.Between 25 July and 13 August 2011 the hallowed St Petersburg company Read more ...