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People and events:
The great
Russian musician Anton Rubinstein ('Anton the Great'; 1829-94) is remembered
as a rival to Franz Liszt in pianism, a remarkable composer and a successful
organizer and educator in music. A concert pianist at nine and a European
piano celebrity at eleven, dubbed Piano Hercules and Piano Jupiter and
as much a chamber performer as a concert-hall thundered, he would have
certainly made a recording star if technology had been on hand. The Rubinstein
pieces for the piano number over 200. He also composed 5 piano concertos,
about 20 chamber ensembles, 5 oratorios, 6 symphonies, more than 130 romances
and songs and 15 operas. Of these, the most famous is 'The Demon' after
a poem of the same name by Mikhail Lermontov. The best remembered bass
in 'The Demon' is Fyodor Shalyapin. The opera 'Nero' survives in the current
repertoire in the form of a beautiful epithalamium from it. The best remembered
singer of this epithalamium is Pavel Lisitsian. Of the romances, many will
have remembered 'The Running Waves of the Kur' (Persian lyrics; praises
the beauty of the Caucasus landscape) and 'Night' (lyrics by Alexander
Pushkin; a customary hit in mezzo-soprano concerts). In 1862, the Russian
Musical Society which was founded by Rubinstein for advancing musical education
and organizing concerts opened this country's first conservatory in St
Petersburg. The first generation of professors there included the Polish
violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski and the Austrian violinist and
conductor Leopold Auer. The first pupils of Rubinstein himself included
Piotr Tchaikovski. In the 1880s, Anton Rubinstein launched what came to
be known as the Historical Concerts, now revived by the Russian conductor
Gennadi Rozhdestvenski. In 1890, he established the world's first regular
international contest of pianists in St Petersburg. Great piano players
competed in it every five years until the outbreak of the First World War.
St Alexander
Nevski, after a battle on the River Neva, is a canonized Russian Duke remembered
for fending away the Germans and the Swedes in the mid-13th century. One
episode, in which he defeated invading Teutonic Knights in a battle on
the ice of Lake Chud near Pskov in the spring of 1242, provided the plot
of a tremendously successful Soviet film about him. Remarkably, in 1938,
in the era of state atheism in this country, director Sergei Eisenstein
offered the viewer openly icon-style imagery and also made Alexander Nevski,
as played by Nikolai Cherkasov, obliquely quote from St Matthew, the passage
in which Jesus Christ warns those drawing the sword of death by the sword.
The music to 'Alexander Nevski', 55 minutes in all, was written by another
20th-century giant, Sergei Prokoffieff. It survives in a soundtrack, which
plays rather poorly by modern standards. In an effort to have the music
back in full splendor, the German conductor Frank Strobel has approximated
the score. He used original Prokoffieff scribbles, the film-based cantata
'Alexander Nevski' and acoustic analysis results. After ten years, the
project came to fruition in the form of a public performance at Moscow's
Bolshoy Theatre on November 27. Sixty six years and four days after going
to its premier show at the same venue, the film 'Alexander Nevski' flickered
on the screen to live music by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra under
Frank Strobel and live singing by the Russian Yurlov Choir under Gennadi
Dmitriak. There was tumultuous applause and an audience on their feet.
Maestro Dmitriak tells us he expects a whole new art to emerge from experiments
to run great films to live music.
I.Yakhontova
Huddled around a landmark
church with five turquoise domes and a sky-high bell tower, Palekh is a
town of six thousand people in the Russian region of Ivanovo northeast
of Moscow. All households in it depend on one industry, making lacquer
souvenirs with bright ethnic pictures on them. A factory employing about
600 painters alone turns out items like jewelry chests, cigarette-cases,
brooches, lockets and spectacle-boxes. They sell in the hundreds of thousands
and win hearts around the globe by drawing the beholder into a fairy-tale
world of golden horses, emerald groves, fantastic firebirds, ornate log
palaces, noble knights and beautiful fancifully clad princesses. Chronicles
first mention the place in the 15th century. From the 16th century, they
speak of it as a center of icon-painting. The trade flourished on until
it was shut by the Bolsheviks following their takeover in 1917. Seven years
later, however, a local painting and business genius named Ivan Golikov
successfully revived it by making it secular and touting it as part of
this country's ethnic heritage. Wood as the carrier medium gave way to
glossy-black lacquered 
papier-mache.
The painting technique remained the same, including an underlayer of gold
dust, for shining through clearings and fine grooves. Later on, synthetic
dyes significantly augmented the arsenal. Success quickly came in the form
of brisk trade and top prizes at exhibitions in Moscow in 1924, Paris in
1925 and Leningrad in 1926. In subsequent decades, Milan, New York and
many other art hubs went into Palekh's award geography. With state atheism
now a thing of the past, Palekh icons are back, together with Palekh murals
in churches and monasteries. Some are to be seen in the Kremlin and even
in the historic monastery of the Holy Trinity and St Sergius northeast
of Moscow. Scenery for ballet and opera, pictures in books and designs
for ads go without saying. The Palekh art is in the psychic fabric of Russia
