Russian Art, Part 1: Who's Afraid of Modern Art?

I can't believe that I have gotten so behind in my posting. I wonder if I should do less and write more? That seems counterproductive somehow.

At any rate, three weeks ago my delightful landlady Natalia invited me to accompany her to the opening of a new Russian modern art museum, Erarta. This place already had a commercial gallery, and then decided to open a museum as well.

The opening was quite an event; probably close to a thousand people attended, certainly many more than expected. Outside before the doors opened there were bands playing and lots of balloons. An MC read off the names of the featured artists, who were ushered into the building to put on their uniforms for a promised soccer game. Finally admitted, we climbed the stairs to the fifth floor--the elevator was occupied by a kind of live art event--and saw a small rectangle of turf with a full sized soccer goal box on each end. That left about 10 feet of playing space between the two goals.

Two teams consisting of some of Russia's most prominent living artists entered to the cheers of the crowd and flipped a coin to determine who would start play. Off they went and twenty seconds later with the first score the game ended. Loud music was playing, and the artists starting stripping out of  Erarta T-shirts to reveal--another just like it underneath. Then they threw their shirts into the adoring throng, like beads at Mardi Gras. That was the beginning of an evening of fun, frivolity, and fine art.

The new museum has five floors and features well-lit and attractively spaced galleries. I was struck by an entire floor of religious lithographs, arranged in groups of 14, like stations of the cross. Other floors featured more secular and sometimes humorous exhibits, often accompanied by living replicas of the subjects. (I assume that these live art events occurred only for the opening night.)

Virtually all of the art works on display were figurative in the broad sense, and most in the narrow sense of depicting the human form.  (This reminds me of an incident in which Joan Miró supposedly declined an award by a society of abstract painters, because, as he said, his art was not abstract; indeed, every squiggle in his fascinating paintings represents something, albeit obliquely.)

I think if I loved every work in a modern art museum, the curator would not be doing his/her job properly. But among those works I liked best were these by Dmitry Shorin, Anastasia Bazanova,  Alexander Kosenkov, Konstantin Grachev, Ekaterina Gracheva, Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Alla Dzhigirei, and Nikolai Kopeikin, whose elephant painting so frightened me in the picture at the top of this post.

After five floors of the museum, I was too exhausted to tour the five floors of the gallery on the other side; that will have to wait for another occasion. The gallery store separating the two parts featured a machine that produces reproductions of the art works full-scale and painted on canvas. So if you can't afford the original, you can still take home a pretty convincing copy.

Clearly the event delighted the huge crowd, which in turn must have thrilled the organizers. I, for one, was grateful for the opportunity to see what is going on in Russian art circles today and to interact with the artists themselves. One stairway features a series of self-portraits of many of them--another way to help us remember the people behind the art.

The Kirov Ballet and the Fish that Got Away

While I have had wonderful tastes of the Mariinsky dancers during the various opera performances, my first experience of a complete evening of ballet took place on Wednesday when I saw Spartacus. The work, with a rousing score by Aram Khachaturian, actually had its premiere in the same house in 1956, four years before the appearance of the well-known movie on the same subject. In a nutshell, Spartacus, his wife Phrygia, and his friend Harmodius are slaves in ancient Rome, under the tyrannical leadership of Marcus Crassus. After witnessing Crassus cause the cruel murder of a slave who stumbled, Spartacus decides to lead a slave rebellion. The rebels are victorious for some time until Crassus's seductive courtesan Aegina succeeds in causing a rupture between Spartacus and Harmodius and their respective supporters. Divided, the rebels are soon conquered, leaving a distraught Phrygia to mourn the loss of her husband.

The ballet opens with a triumphal procession of Marcus Crassus, which at the Mariinsky involved over 100 people, including at least 50 men (some were buff supernumeraries rather than dancers). Danila Korsuntsev was dashing in the title role, and Sofia Gumerova and Ekaterina Kondaurova were respectively moving and seductive as the faithful wife and the femme fatale. The choreography that I saw, based on the original choreography by Leonid Yakobson, was graceful, musical, and certainly full of spectacle. Apparently it was considered controversial at the time, because Yakobson completely dispensed with toe shoes so the women were never dancing en pointe. This seemed more than appropriate with the ancient Roman costumes.  However, the better-known version of Spartacus is the second Bolshoi staging by Yuri Grigorovich featuring not only toe shoes but striking athleticism.  Here is the Grigorovich/Bolshoi staging of the famous Act III Adagio. This next video claims to be the same in the Yakobson staging, but is actually a passage in Act II with the same musical theme. Other passages from both stagings are also available on Youtube

As in the case of "the artist formerly known as Prince," to me the Mariinsky ballet is "the company formerly known as Kirov." Kirov was the name used by the company during the Soviet era, and still used when the company goes on tour since it is good for box office. In St. Petersburg, though, the name Mariinsky has been restored and the name "Kirov" has been relegated to the same purgatory as the thankfully abandoned "Leningrad."

Delighted with Spartacus, I eagerly looked forward to seeing Bayaderka (La Bayadère) the following Saturday. La Bayadère, like its better-known sibling, the ballet version of Don Quixote, was originally choreographed by Marius Petipa (arguably the most important choreographer of all time) to a score by Ludwig (a.k.a. Léon) Minkus. The ballet premiered in 1877 here in St. Petersburg.  La Bayadère is principally known in the west for its famous scene, "The Kingdom of the Shades."  Each member of the corps de ballet enters on a long zig-zagging ramp, strikes an arabesque, and steps forward, making room for the addition of the next dancer. This continues in achingly beautiful symmetry until all 32 dancers have entered. It may not sound like much, but when you see it, it is breathtaking.

Up until 2000, more than a century after its premiere, for various reasons well-explained in the unusually thorough wikipedia article, the original four-act version of Bayaderka had never been seen or even heard in the west. In that year, the Mariinsky ballet began assembling a reconstruction of Petipa's 1900 revival of the work, which had been preserved in dance notation since that time. The restored version received a mixed response in Russia, but was rapturously greeted when the Kirov took it on tour to London and New York.

So on Saturday I arrived at the Mariinsky Theatre well prepared in the the history of this important work, eager to see the world's only production in 100 years of the original version, presented in the city of its premiere. Alas, for the first time in St Petersburg, I was unable to get a ticket as every seat in the theatre had been sold! I hovered near the entrance of the theatre, certain that at the last minute some wife would have failed to convince her husband to join her at the ballet, to no avail. Apparently husbands in Russia are either more docile or more interested in ballet than in the US, or both. I will have to await the return of the ballet in November.

Vive le Conservatoire! Да здравствует консерватория

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

It is a joy to be working in the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. The quality of the students is extraordinary, and the quality of opportunities they are offered is equally high. I am coaching them on repertory in English, German and French, and also making interpretive comments where appropriate. Their voices are impressive and they are amazingly advanced for undergraduates. A number of the students have transfered into the Conservatory a few years into their college education. They began studying voice as a sidebar to their studies and discovered their gifts. This also allowed some of them to develop a little farther vocally before entering the Conservatory.

Once admitted, voice students have an astonishing three hour lessons a week with their applied teacher, plus an hour with another vocal specialist in their Vocal Chamber Music program. This much one-on-one time is naturally very expensive and is out of the reach of most music schools. In addition, an excellent pianist is supplied for them for every lesson. These pianists hurl themselves fearlessly and cheerfully at everything thrown at them from Medtner to Bernstein.

Last week the Conservatory hosted an international music education conference centered around the implications for music schools in Europe and Russia of the "Bologna Process Principles." The Bologna Principles have to do with the goal of international "convergence" (they prefer that word to "standardization") of curriculum among institutions of higher education, which would make it easier for students to move more freely between countries while continuing their education.

This creates an interesting challenge for Russian conservatories, which are justifiably proud of their accomplishments in the technical preparation of musicians. Should they reduce their commitment to applied study in order to make room for other elements called for in the unified curriculum? Stay tuned!

While this conference was taking place, the Conservatory continued its festival of performances based on the theme of the Tsars. A concert presentation of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Tsar's Bride crowned the series. This was a particularly apt choice, since Rimsky-Korsakov taught composition and orchestration at the Conservatory and it now bears his name.  The Tsar's Bride was apparently intended by its composer to be a manifesto in favor of bel canto style over Wagner's operatic reforms. Nonetheless, Wagner is like the pink elephant in the room; you can hear his influence popping up every few minutes. The opera was completed in 1898, and its story reads like a combination of Elixir of Love with the recently completed "Cavalleria Rusicana"--two works that really shouldn't be combined. I expected a light comedy along the lines of The Bartered Bride about the Tsar marrying a perky peasant girl. Imagine my surprise when at the end of the opera, everyone was dead!

Despite the unexpected darkness of the scenario, the music is filled with beauty and emotion. It was my first time seeing one of my idols of Russian song, Sergei Leiferkus, who at 64 still has considerable vocal power and stature on stage. Here is a recording of him singing a Rachmaninoff song I have been learning, "I was with her." He was surrounded with other wonderfully talented alumni and students of the Conservatory. Most outstanding was the young mezzo, Olesya Petrova whose voice combined haunting beauty with great power, taking me back to the night I was present for Dolora Zajick's major house debt at the San Francisco Opera. Petrova, who is only 28 and a recent graduate of the Conservatory, took second prize in the famous Tchaikovsky competiton in Moscow. Similarly impressive were Ekaterina Goncharova, Vasiliy Pochapskiy, Yuriy Vlasov, and Egor Nikolaev in the other principal roles. All in all it was a fine finale to the series and a fitting tribute to a great Conservatory.