1 A profile of Willi Boskovsky, the Vienna concertmaster who directed the New Year’s Day concert for 25 years. Rare, early footage of Willi’s waltzes at 8:00
2 Is Pushkin about to make a comeback?
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/tea-with-the-pushkins-in-brussels/
3 The lowest voice you’ll ever hear
4 What happened to culture in the First World War
http://standpointmag.co.uk/critique-january-february-13-the-artistic-legacy-of-the-great-war-norman-lebrecht-world-war-one-picasso
5 Furtwängler (see here)
6 Late Furtwängler
Hmmm, that’s a bottom GG in the final cadence of the Russian choral music
Thanks for the link to the Pushkin article,
The discrepancy between Alexander Pushkin’s reputation in Russia and abroad is indeed surprising.
I don’t read Russian, so it’s hard to say to what extent the translations in the old Penguin editions compromise the original texts. I never bought the newer, revised editions.
The West African connection was news to me as well.
Further, it’s hard to believe that such a tremendous cultural figure never traveled abroad.
Mr Lebrecht: is the author of the Pushkin piece, Michael Johnson, the same writer who wrote that scathing piece about piano competitions in the New York Times?
Pushkin’s reputation here in Russia is perilously close to apotheosis. I am not really certain this is necessarily a good thing – it makes objective criticism of his work almost impossible. The USSR is largely responsible for building Pushkin’s reputation to this level – the name of “Pushkin” became synonymous with any connection to culture. For example the principle art gallery in Moscow was renamed “The Pushkin Fine Arts Museum” – although Pushkin had few links to painting, and failed his own art classes when at the Lyceum.
Part of the background to this was the paranoid over-shoulder-staring in which the USSR indulged. Russia has no equal or parallel figures to Shakespeare, Goethe or Voltaire, and so one had to be created. Pushkin is a fine poet – but due to the accident of history, and his early death, his output can’t be compared to Shakespeare’s.
Underlying all of this is the critical fact that Russia never had a Renaissance, owing to the massive controlling power of the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia has never had a civil society in the way that term is understood in France, Germany or Britain – and free and liberal cultural traditions cannot grow naturally in the hothouse environment in which Russia has tried to nurture its writers, artists and composers. Instead Russia has attempted to ‘grow’ talent in a crony culture, in which a few hopeful characters have been larded with praise and resources, and the rest have been utterly ignored. Of course, if you allow politicos to choose the hopeful talent, they almost always choose no-hopers who appear to be innocuous safe bets. Thus the USSR ploughed time and resources into feeble yes-men, while almost all of its true talents met early and violent deaths at the hands of the regime, or were painted into a corner – Mandelstam, Shostakovich, and the rest of the long list. But I don’t aim to blame Communism alone here – this treatment of artists is typical of Russian society over long years. Pushkin himself was hounded (of course, they’ll never admit that), Tchaikovsky was blackmailed into suicide, Dostoyevsky was sent to a Siberian prison camp, Meyerhold was tortured to death. The inheritors of Meyerhold’s murderers now run Russia – Vladimir Putin, Patriarch Kirill (an enthusiastic secret service agent for his entire life) etc.
Of course, many Russian writers have rebelled against the Primacy of Pushkin. The surrealist author Daniel Uvachevsky – who wrote under the pen-name of Daniel Kharms – found the entire situation absurd. He took his revenge on Pushkin in a series of amusing skits about the imagined lives of the Russia’s great authors – which imagine Tolstoy meeting Pushkin in St Petersburg, and chasing him down the street etc. The soviet thugs had little time for anyone who was rude about their hero Pushkin – one day a car turned up outside Kharms’s house, he was bundled inside, and he was never seen again.