From Firebird to Revolution, 1910-17

First term of my Russian music course on Zoom went well, by which I mean there were lots of happy students and I enjoyed every minute of it, firming up allegiances and discovering more (especially in the sphere of chamber music). In the end we covered ground from Glinka to early Rachmaninov, stopping at 1900, with a few glimpses into the future. My original idea, to devote the 10th class to Stravinsky's The Firebird as a last great synthesis of the fantasy tradition, was postponed simply because the one class I'd intended on Musorgsky's and Tchaikovsky's piano music turned into two. 

That was because Samson Tsoy had so much to say about Pictures at an Exhibition and his partner Pavel Kolesnikov, who popped up briefly at the end of that class, was happy to return a couple of weeks later. When great musicians are willing to come along, as they did for every class of my course on the symphony, you have to be flexible (pictured below by Eva Vermandel, Samson and Pavel during their phenomenal Ragged Music Festival, from which I'm still recovering: read what one of my students described as a 'palpitating' review - that's got to be better than 'gushing').

I'd also intended to go straight on from the first term to Soviet music. But it occurred to me that those seven amazing years from 1910 to 1917 could take a term of their own, albeit one of seven classes (taking a break and mapping out the possible up to Christmas meant I ended up with that number). Here's the plan. We start on Thursday 29 October and each class runs from 2.30pm-4.30pm (longer under certain circumstances). £10 a class so £70 for the term. Special guests TBC, though two top pianists have already shown willingness. UPDATE (19/11) Seven classes have evolved into eight, due to an enrichment not unlike the one we had in the first term.

 1: The Firebird and the end of a tradition  29 October

Stravinsky's first ballet for Diaghilev - the exotic exported to Paris - reflected the fairy-tale compendium of its scenario with homages to the fantasies of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and others, but also nodded to the harmonic experiments of Scriabin and looked forward to the rhythmic revolution of The Rite of Spring. I'll be placing it in the context of the 19th century tradition as well as the early years of the 20th century. Pictured above: Mikhail Fokine and Tamara Karsavina in the 1910 Ballets Russes premiere.

2: Petrushka and Russian popular song  5 November

Stocked high with highly original treatments of familiar folk/urban song, Stravinsky's fairground ballet of 1911 features a radical use of orchestration which owes its originality to Tchaikovsky's example. But it is also startlingly modern in the scenes featuring the pathetic Russian Pierrot come to life. Hungarian-born conductor Gergely Madaras is our special guest.

3: The Rite of Spring I: mostly melodic and traditional  12 November

Often overshadowed in the stress on rhythmic iconoclasm is Stravinsky's use of singing themes - only three of them this time taken from folk sources. Again, the mix of modernism and tradition is startling. Pictured above: maidens in Nicolas Roerich's designs for the Ballets Russes premiere of 1913. Andrew Litton, whose BIS recordings of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring are such a revelation, joined us for this class, and going with the flow meant we were only halfway through what needed to be said and demonstrated about the work. A second hour was intended the following week, which stretched to two - hence the offer I've just made of a free eighth class.

4: The Rite of Spring 2: polyrhythms and unfathomable accents  19 November

Andrew's return yielded more fascinating chapter and verse, and the return of Catherine Larsen-Maguire gave us insights into the writing for bassoon - her instrument before she changed to conducting. Leonard Bernstein in his Norton lecture 'The Poetry of Earth', Pina Bausch's choreography and Stravinsky speaking again on the aftermath also joined the party.

5: ''Footballish' pianism and audacious orchestral tricks: the young Prokofiev  26 November

 

 

First appearing on the scene in the same St Petersburg Evenings of Contemporary Music where Stravinsky made his debut, a young Conservatoire student quickly created a sensation. With special focus on Prokofiev's first two piano concertos, early piano pieces and the Scythian Suite derived from his first ballet music for Diaghilev, Ala and Lolly.

6: Rachmaninov's The Bells and his Vespers as part of the revived Russian Orthodox tradition  3 December

 

The rediscovery of ancient church traditions only really took off in the early 1900s, and was flourishing when the revolution put a stop to so many schools of choral music. Before that happened, though, it produced its greatest synthesis-masterpiece, Rachmaninov's numbers for the All-Night Easter Vigil known as the Vespers, in total contrast to his choral symphony inspired by Edgar Allen Poe The Bells.

7: Scriabin: mystic chords and apocalyptic visions  10 December

 

 

Boris Pasternak thought him 'warped, posed and opinionated' but also as bright as the sun in his music; Prokofiev found his harmonic discoveries a millstone weighing down his options. But there's no doubt that Alexander Scriabin was a true original

 

8: On the eve of an earthquake  17 December

 

What kind of music were the Russian composers creating as the February and then the October revolutions broke? Prokofiev's diary gives a special insight into where he was and what he was doing at these times, with cinematic descriptions of being caught up in the chaos of Petrograd early in the year. We also look at Rachmaninov's last great compositional flowering before exile and the need to tour as pianist slowed down his creativity.

 

Do join us - and if you can't do so on the afternoon, I send out recordings (video if film is used, audio otherwise). You don't need to have attended the previous course. If you're interested, just send me a message with your email: I won't publish it, but I promise to respond.

Still life in a turbulent time

Right at the heart of the colourful riot that is the Royal Academy of Arts' Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932, in a room devoted entirely to the unique style of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, my eye was drawn to this still life of 1918. I knew several others of his, but not the extraordinary treatment he lends to a herring, a couple of potatoes and a lump of bread - the restricted fare of hard times.

It's the artist's prerogative to lend grace to the ordinary in a nutshell. A parallel struck me the day after seeing the exhibition at a point I reached in Péter Esterházy's Celestial Harmonies - not easy reading, but every page of this discursive take on the author's very famous family deserves to be savoured, and a lightness of touch mitigates the difficulty of grasping such allusice richness. His father, under the straitened circumstances in which the family finds itself under Communism, is making a drama of preparing to attack a bone for its marrow by extracting it from the cooking pot.

'The midnight predators gather for the kill,' our father announced mock-heroically, then sat down at the kitchen table with ceremony, the pot in front of him. We crowded around him, buzzing and craning our necks, so we shouldn't miss anything. 'Take your places,' he said, looking at us with make-believe severity and then, like a chief physician at the operating table (or a priest conducting mass), he raised his two hands. 'The scalpel, sweetheart!' he said to mother, who did and did not take part in the show. She was happy that we were happy, we, her children, and also the man who at that moment was busy pretending that life is beautiful and exciting, and he the master of all he surveys, the benefactor of the small group for whose benefit he was demonstrating that this beauty and excitement is everywhere at all times: just look, even in a bone, a leg of beef!

And perhaps it's not even pretending so much as creating, on both the author's and his father's part. By the same token, Petrov-Vodkin wraps magic around the ordinary in the RA room devoted to his work, an exhibition-within-an-exhibition. Of course there are questions around the stunt as a whole: the plutocrats and the Russian governmental propagandists making the exhibition possible with a stunning array of the best - Moscow and St Petersburg galleries must be bare of their post-revolutionary masterpieces at the moment - as well as the questionable aspects of celebrating a vision that quickly soured. A grim 'Room of Memory' at the end, showing 'criminal' mugshots of many who were murdered under Lenin and Stalin, attempts to make amends.

But surely the point is the unleashing of energy, good or bad, into kinetic art. For, despite the stillness in the leading image, all is movement in this exhibition. And there are some impressive novelties which fit the giant RA rooms so well: the recreation of an El Lissitzky workers' room in the 'Brave New World' gallery, which is more coherent than it looks here

and above all the magnificent attempt at reassembling Malevich's room of his own work for the 1932 exhibition 'Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republics'. Not even the recent Malevich show at Tate Modern managed this.

The RA has gathered together most of those original works - with, I think I'm right in saying, only two substitutions - and recreated the models; the effect is very impressive, possibly more so than the original, of which we do have a photograph.

Otherwise, the revelations to me were the Petrov-Vodkin collection, the ceramics and the work of one artist with whom I wasn't familiar, Alexander Deineka - variable, but this one of textile workers fascinated me.

For the rest, it was a bracing reacquaintance with many old friends, and nostalgic memories especially of many hours spent in St Petersburg's Russian Museum - a more essential gallery for the understanding of the native culture, certainly, than the breathtaking Hermitage.

We leaped from one exhibition to another, the David Hockney retrospective at Tate Britain, for an intimate little gathering of 2000 or so folk thinking they were going to get a close audience with the master. Actually we did, since when we arrived the queues to get in to the exhibition proper were enormous, and - diverted by good company - we suddenly found ourselves with only 15 minutes to rush around. So the first two rooms, with pictures of the ilk of 'We Two Boys Together Clinging', which impacted so much on me as a teenager, were empty, and in the third our only companions were Ian McKellen and Neil Tennant, chatting - appropriately enough - in front of the theatrical 'Ventriloquist' canvas.

The whirl wouldn't have worked if we hadn't already been so familiar with many of the canvases, and seen so many in previous exhibitions, but no doubt about it - this would have to be the most impressive in terms of together-hanging, above all in the room of heyday swimming-pool paintings and double portraits.

Then it's on to the exquisite drawings, his best portraits (Auden and mum especially) followed by the photomontages (mum, again, at Whitby Abbey my favourite) and the last room with stuff I really love, the colourful road pictures.

And these two of still lives - only connect - by the sea; I didn't know them. I hope these people will forgive their featuring in my general impression.

On to the English nature pictures, the paint rather gauchely applied IMO,

and to the less interesting final rooms. As Hockney's old pal and ours (of lesser years) Jonny Brown observed, it must have been the artist's choice not to include his (again IMO) terrible later portraits (the National Gallery wardens must be the worst). Here's Jonny with the ever-amazing wise young bird Thierry Alexandre by Millais' Ophelia

in the dreadfully-hung and badly-lit Tate Britain room mixing Pre-Raphaelites with really superior stuff like several of Whistler's Nocturnes. And Thierry allows me to transition to something I should have written about months ago, beloved artist Paul Ryan's show on the impact of InterRailing at Europe House's 12 Star Gallery. Here's the diva/o's back, in the first of the portraits here taken by the 12 Star's resident photographer,

and further portraits in front of some of the exhibits: the artist flanked by myself on the left and dear Chris Gunness with my goddog (by which I mean I am his godfather) Teddy on the right,

the great Jeremy Deller alongside his InterRail exhibit,

composer David Sawer with the manuscript of an early work written in the wake of an InterRailing experience,

and Lady C with her dog - I had to leave for Richard Jones's production of Once in a Lifetime so didn't get to meet them - in front of hers.

It all brought back memories of happy days in which I discovered the joys of independent travel - first under the organisational aegis of Christopher Lambton, who worked out our train journey to Istanbul and back, with a further loop by other transports in the wake of the military coup around the west coast, in 1981; and then, the following summer, the revelation of how good it was to travel alone, and feel completely free, after I left friend Simon at Ravenna and travelled on to Padua, Venice and Vienna with Bertrand Russell's The Pursuit of Happiness confirming the source of my joy.