Ukraine
theartsdesk Olympics: Football under Hitler's eyesThursday, 26 July 2012A football team normally heads out onto the pitch determined to win – unless, perhaps, the match has been fixed. Or unless they’ve been under Gestapo pressure to lose. That was what happened at the legendary “Death Match” in Kiev in August 1942. A... Read more... |
Men in Motion, Sadler's Wells TheatreSaturday, 28 January 2012Sergei Polunin’s flight this week from the Royal Ballet just as he rises to the pinnacle made last night's Sadler's Wells show a very hot ticket for those who wanted to catch his guest appearance in it. But the evening was also a proclamation that... Read more... |
Door left ajar for Royal Ballet star who quitThursday, 26 January 2012The young Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin, Covent Garden's most remarkable male discovery for years, has quit the company in a stunning shock that today sent consternation throughout the ballet world from the USA to Japan. But tonight Royal Opera... Read more... |
The music man who kept them dogies rollin'Tuesday, 25 October 2011On Thursday the London Symphony Orchestra plays a night of epic movie music by the man who gave America’s cowboy heroes their most stirring tunes. Dimitri Tiomkin was one of Hollywood’s film-score giants, John Wayne’s choice as composer for The... Read more... |
My Summer Reading: Violinist Vadim GluzmanTuesday, 06 September 2011Some violinists just play; others have a voice. Ukrainian-Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman follows the distinguished line of great Petersburg violinist Leopold Auer - whose 1690 Stradivarius he currently plays - David Oistrakh and Isaac Stern, his... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Odessa: Monty Python on the Black SeaSunday, 31 July 2011Odessa must be one of Central Europe’s more distinctive cities, characterised by a profoundly cosmopolitan ethnic mix over more than two centuries. It was one of the most international cities in the Tsarist empire, while in Soviet times it honed... Read more... |
DVD: Arsenal & ZvenigoraSaturday, 19 February 2011What a time of ferment of artistic revolution the 1920s were in the Soviet Union. Pioneering arts techniques overlapped for an all-too-brief period with the progressive ideology of communism. Alexander Dovzhenko’s Arsenal and Zvenigora were at the... Read more... |
DVD Release: EarthSunday, 13 June 2010Note 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... Read more... |
A starlet no longer - now Sergei is to be Covent Garden's new starThursday, 10 June 2010A new male star will be leading the Royal Ballet next season - a prodigious in-house talent of just 20. Sergei Polunin, Ukrainian-born and Royal Ballet School-trained, has been elevated to top rank in the Royal Ballet’s end-of-year promotions after... Read more... |
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