From Russia with Love ; the Bolshoi Turned Shostakovich's Ballet Into a Revelation at Covent Garden This Month. Can the Mariinsky Do the Same with His Opera at the Proms This Weekend?

Summary

---

THE CENTENNIAL year of Dmitri Shostakovich, who was born in St Petersburg on 25 September, 1906, and has his Proms window this weekend, has yielded a rush of fresh perspectives - far more than the concurrent avalanche of Mozart 250th events, which has merely rewrapped the same old marzipan balls for gullible consumption.

Six new books on Mozart have failed to elicit one new fact of any consequence, and the laying out of all 22 operas at Salzburg this month merely confirms the gulf of genius that separates the three Da Ponte scripts - Figaro, Cosi and Don Giovanni - from the next rung of Idomeneo, Clemenza and the Magic Flute; and beyond them lies a wilderness of dreary plots and musical Polyfilla. Any latecomer who mistakes Zaide for Zauberflote is going to get locked in for an interminable stretch at upwards of e200 a seat.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

From Russia with Love ; the Bolshoi Turned Shostakovich's Ballet Into a Revelation at Covent Garden This Month. Can the Mariinsky Do the Same with His Opera at the Proms This Weekend?

Shostakovich, in polar contrast, has preserved his mystery and redoubled his appeal. His inner mind has resisted scholarly penetration, along with the secrets of his marital and extramarital lives. There is no new biography in the works and the heat has gone out of the historians' row as to whether he was a cowed follower of Soviet do...

See the full content of this document

---