Final Day in St. Petersburg

On our last day in St. Petersburg, we had a chance to visit the famed Vaganaova Ballet Academy where all the great ballet dancers of our time trained, includeing Nureyev, Balanchine, Baryshnikov, etc... We sat down with the Director-General, Madame Vera Doreefeva. Madame Doreefeva is quite the formidable director one might imagine running such an elite ballet school. After being presented with Vaganova Academy tea cups, we sat in on a few ballet classes, the last of which was a group of 20 year old girls who were about to graduate and their legendary instructor, who was herself a prima ballerina. The dancers were beautiful, mostly from Russia but a few from Japan and Bulgaria. We also had a chance to meet a young 20 year old girl from Washington DC, the only American at the school. She was in her first year, and seemed to be loving it. Both Tom and I felt sorry we didn’t offer to buy her a cup of coffee to see how she was doing.

Attached is a photo of Tom and I with Madame Doreefeva.

Lastly, we visited Maestro Valery Gergiev's new concert hall, opened this past april. His orchestra the Kirov Orchestra, will be coming to us in 2008-09.

In our final evening, I went to see Uncle Vanya, a great success, and Tom went to see the winners of the St. Petersburg Conservatory's vocal competition....

Glad to be home.

Emil

Day Three in St. Petersburg

Hi everyone. Today, we awoke to a blanket of snow. I thought it couldn’t get any colder, but it did. Even I was freezing today, and you all know how I like the cold.

Anyway, after visiting Catherine the Great's Summer Palace, we went to the St. Petersburg Conservatory where the greats were students, like Prokofiev, Jascha Heifetz, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, etc.... One photo is of Tom and me with the head of the concerts program in front of the bust of Rimsky-Korsakov. Then, a pic of Tom and me in front of a plaque of Shostakovich, who composed in this classroom.

We then met with the Director of Development of the Mariinsky (Kirov) Theatre and discussed bringing the Mariinsky to Chapel Hill with Valery Gergiev.... The last pic is a photo of the theatre....

Tomorrow is our last day. I actually look forward to coming home.

Tom and I had our first shots of Russian Imperial Vodka. yum.....

St. Petersburg - Day Two

Day two in St. Petersburg was spent in the Hermitage Museum. Incredible place - way too much to see in one visit. We spent much of our time seeing the incredible paintings by Titian, Raphael, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rubens, Van Dyck, and the Van Gogh's and Matisse's they have.

The museum is an interesting place. On one hand, they have hundreds of thousands of priceless objects, and have begun to capitalize on tourists with gift shops etc... yet on the other hand there are still remnants of the Soviet days. The guards are a group of senior women, dressed in haggard, dark, colorless and lifeless dresses who sit in each room chit-chatting in corners oblivious to the art, others are sleeping, and yet others are just staring out the windows!

Two experiences to share with these women, in one gallery i accidentally took a flash photo of a Raphael (photo attached), and one of these women started to scream at me, and she said in complete and good English (HEY YOU! HAVE YOU NEVER BEEN IN A MUSEUM BEFORE! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!) I was surprised by this verbal assault coming from this older woman, and it was clear I hadn't been the first recipient of this upbraiding.
Second, One woman, in a gallery that included some Matisse masterpiece opened some windows because she was warm, right in the gallery. When our guide shut them, saying the snow coming in the gallery was not good for the paintings, she retorted, I learned "I can close the windows when i want them. When told these were bad for the paintings, she said, these paintings have been here for nearly 200 years and are fine!!

Anyway, i saw a performance by the Maly Theatre in a new adapation of the 1959 Wassily Grossman book Life and Fate. It was an incredible, but nearly 4 hours, that looked at WWII, and the relations of people both in German and Russian concentration camps, the fascists v. communists the collaboration of Stalin and Hitler, and the role of the Communist party. Obviously, not a picker-upper... but incredibly powerful. The produciton featured supertitles. The main prop on stage was a huge steel fence that spanned the width of the stage on a diagonal. It was a packed house but its clear Russians dont have the girth of Americans as the seats were very narrow and I felt like a sardine. Also, it was a billion degrees inside.

We met the esteemed director Lev Donin and are having dinner with him on Tue after another performance by the company of Uncle Vanya. They havent been to america since 02 and to bring them to CH doing both Life and Fate and Uncle Vanya would be great.
Its a blizzard outside and in the temp is in the single digits.....

We visit the St. Petersburg Conservatory tomorrow....

Big news all over Russia today is the Parliamentary Elections which took place earlier on Sunday. As of this moment, they project Putin's United Russia party with a landslide victory of 60% of the vote. this comes with 300 out of 400 seats in parliament. Nearly all the arts professionals we met today were disappointed but not surprised and all believe that Putin will indeed carry through on his promise that he will become Prime Minister even as he steps down after 8 years as President..Another note, the Communist Party won 11% of the vote too....

Incredible.

Photos attached....

St. Petersburg

Hi All. End of our first day in St. Petersburg. A beautiful city built on canals, rivers, and full of huge ornate palaces along side the river embankments.

Attached are a whole bunch of photos from around town: The Hermitage, to statues of Peter the Great, there were wedding groups taking tons of photos outside in 0 degree weather.

We just returned from seeing the Mariinsky (aka Kirov) Ballet perform a Russian work call "Legend of Love." Packed house full of children and men in suits. What a beautiful theatre. While we were disappointed to miss seeing the Bolshoi theater due to renovations, we were thrilled to get a glimpse of the Mariinsky.

Its humbling to realize that we had the rare experience of seeing the Bolshoi Ballet and the Mariinsky Ballet on two consecutive nights with an 8 hour train ride in between.

On and one photo of some billboards of upcoming performances by 50 cent and Korn in the land of ballet.

Mockba to Санкт-Петербурге

One of the photos attached is of me and the Director of touring for the Bolshoi Ballet, Elena Perfilova. The dancers were marvelous, especially the lead, but the set and costumes left us a bit cold.

And, on a funny note, It was Sponsor night at the Bolshoi, and the Sponsor was Samsung and the Bolshoi theatre was overrun with Koreans!!! Koreans speaking both Russian and Korean. So, when Tom and I arrived at the stage door, no one could figure out who we were - it turns out they thought we were there for Samsung. So the one time in Russia where there are too many Koreans! The CEO of Samsung Russia, a middle aged Korean man, came out and delivered a long and boring speech in Russian (Long and Boring to us perhaps because we couldn’t understand it).

We left the theater to board the midnight train to St. Petersburg.
Anyway, we are now fresh off the train from Moscow and are in St. Petersburg. Its incredible the difference between these two cities. As we drove away from the train station, it immediately came clear to us that this city was much cleaner, orderly and much less chaotic. Also, NO SNOW! Thank god!

Also, while Moscow seemed exotic as it was rare for us to find any english speakers or signs in english and very few, if any, tourists, St. Petersburg is filled with tourists and english speakers. Its actually a bit of a let down for Tom and me.

Lastly, the train ride was terrific. I actually did sleep for a few hours before we rolled into town and was served a hot breakfast of some unidentifiable meat patty with some french fries, all covered in gravy.... Yuck. The Grolsch helped it go down fairly quickly.

More from St. Petersburg later today or tomorrow.

in Mockba

Hi all. Alright. Its really cold now, snowy, dreary, dark, and gloomy in Moscow. Anyway, here are some photos of Red Square with shots of the Kremlin entrance and St. Basil's Cathedral. We did a bit of sightseeing but not a lot. Of course, had to take a photo of Emma's car in Moscow. Also are shots of the 1980 Olympic stadium and ski jump.

A lot more to tell. I believe Moscow has the world's worst traffic. On my way to a meeting with the Chekhov Theatre Festival, we got stuck in it. At one point, we moved 1 foot in 1/2 hour. It got so bad, and I was so late, that my driver, jumped out, talked to some security guard, then tried to communicate something to me in Russian that I couldn’t understand, and started to back up and backed into a driveway that led into a courtyard. When we parked, I figured out what was going on. He handed the rent-a-cop 300 rubles (~$12)(read: bribe) to let him park there. He then proceeded to walk me to my meeting.....He also refused to take a tip! It was crazy!

Tom and I also had dinner last night at Café Pushkin, a famous hot spot. Anyway, David Eden, the Russian producer who we're working with in 08-09, told me we should have dinner and ask to be seated on the first floor and not the second floor as the first floor was more authentic.

Well, so we did that. The host asked if we spoke Russian, and when we said no, he proceeded to take us upstairs. It turns out that the first floor of the restaurant, a loud, dark, smoky restaurant with a mix of old, young, business and social oriented patrons, was for Russians only, and served a different menu that upstairs, which was French/Russian. And of course, the prices were higher for us non-Russians! The upstairs room looked more of foreigners (French and Italian from what we could tell) and of course, they smelled of green. I took some photos of the Russian 1st floor menu that we were denied.

Incredible, anyway, after an evening of sinful eating of caviar, blinis, sauerkraut soup, venison, dumplings, and baked sterlet (apparently a relative of the sturgeon that lives in the river not the sea), the bill came to over 19,000 rubles or $800!!!!! (for two of us!) Thank god our hosts foot the bill.

Off to the Bolshoi and then on the overnight train to St. Petersburg.

Arrival in Moscow

Hi all: Its 8pm. Just arrived at my hotel, a good 26 hours after leaving RDU. The ride from Sheremetyevo Airport to the hotel alone took 2 hours in gridlock traffic. However, the air is surprisingly clean, crisp, and there are steady snow showers falling, and around 30 degrees or so i think. I landed at the airport at 130pm and had 3 hours to kill waiting for Tom Kearns to arrive so explored the airport. It is fairly run down. The air is filled with cigarette smoke and there were a flock of gypsy cab drivers hawking rides, with sales pitches that ran from "you need taxi, minimum price for you my friend" to "Are you American" which of course led me to believe they had a unique fare for Americans. I sat in a typical airport waiting area next to a gaggle of middle-aged women having a loud debate on what i think was about Sunday's parlimentary election as I heard the names Putin and Gasparov mentioned a number of times. I couldnt help but think how different this conversation would have been during the Soviet/KGB era. And, just next to these women were Moscow police in their green and red uniforms with the oversize military caps standing nearby smoking away without a care in the world.

Riding into the city was also fascinating. I realized its the only "Western" city i know of that uses a totally different alphabet. If one blocked out the cyrillic on the "Times Square" like neon billboards, signs, lights, etc... you could easily imagine the downtown part being Vienna, Paris, London, or Madrid. The classical architecture is stunning but hopefully since it was pitch black here by 5pm today, i'll have a chance to see more of the city tomorrow.

Tom and I are going out to dinner with a friend of his son's who's taking us out to a club. He's an American in his 40s who lives in Moscow and made a fortune signing Russian hockey players to the NHL.

Anyway, more later.