Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
From Letters of a Russian Traveller by Nikolai M. Karamzin (1793): The town is rather small and, apart from the duke’s castle, one can’t find a single huge house here. — I was interrogated at the town gate, after which…
An announcement as heard by a forum contributor: “October 8, the Mariinsky performs Wagner’s cult opera, Tristan und Isolde.”
A.C. Douglas thunders against the “genteel pap” style of art critism, quoting an old post by Michael Blowhard as an example of the wrong approach. This reminds me of the time, about ten years ago, when I tried to figure…
A conservative when it came to theater, Mikhail Bulgakov was skeptical of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s avant-guard productions. In The Fateful Eggs (1925), Bulgakov wrote of a “theater named after Vsevolod Meyerhold, who, as is well known, died in 1927 during a…
JCB quotes from a Le Figaro review of Le Destin russe et la Musique by Frans L. Lemaire. The review seems informative but also confusing in some important ways. The author (or the reviewer) shouldn’t have ignored the evolution of…
Visiting a major Russian bank today, I noticed two interesting paintings in one of the reception halls. One depicted two old-fashioned women playing lawn tennis. The other was mostly hilly corn fields with two houses up there in a distance.…
In 1892, Tchaikovsky visited Hamburg for a premiere of Eugene Onegin. “The Kapellmeister here,” wrote Pyotr Ilyich, “is not your average type — a mere genius!” It was Gustav Mahler.
Your Marketing Sucks by Mark Stevens got translated as Vash marketing — otstoy. Well done. A former colleague of mine used to translated “sucks” literally, which resulted in etot komp’yuter sosyot and such.
It is clear now, even to me, that Khodorkovsky is a political prisoner. But quite a few other people have been arrested in the course of the YUKOS investigation. All of them, I believe, should be considered political prisoners. Most…
Pop art vulgarity sometimes seems to border on something good and genuine — but you can never tell for sure. Here are four pictures from a recent Tristan und Isolde production in the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, conducted by…
Legend has it that shortly after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Sergei Eisenstein staged Die Walküre at the Bolshoi. It’s not really a legend. It’s true. And why shouldn’t it be, narrowly speaking? Long before Eisenstein, Russia’s imperial opera…
What is the most unusual achievement of Renaissance Italian architecture? Well, the Moscow Kremlin, of course.