city bingo (re-visited)

Haven't played city bingo for a while - but posters for aging rock stars and tribute bands (city bingo 5) continue to abound...

where aging rockers still rock

Went for business lunch* at a kind of blues bar just around the corner from the Lenin Library. As we entered everyone else but me let out a quiet hiss of amazement. The person idly strumming his guitar on stage turned out to be very famous, Andrey Vadimovich Makarevich,  a pioneer of Soviet rock music with a band called Mashina Vremeni/Time Machine, founded in 1969 and the only rock band from period still going. Very impressed since playing Beatles-influenced rock music in the Soviet Union was never going to be a soft option. 

Turns out Time Machine are playing a 40th anniversary gig in Toronto in April 2011, if you happen to be in Canada...


* Business lunch/Бизнес ланч: a term now part of the Russian language, and meaning basic variations on soup, salad and main priced at around 250 roubles or 5 quid. Always worth checking out - the business lunch in this bar, the Roadhouse, was basic, filling and tasty.

a big thank you

Can't mention the concert without also thanking my landlady and neighbours for inviting me, such a generous thing to do. They were friends of Pavel Messner (he owned the next door dacha ) and obviously miss him.

bombs and chandeliers

Found out about Domodedovo bomb pretty immediately after it happened, as some of my colleagues were departing from there (they left safely but, of course, delayed).  And then went straight to a piano concert at the Moscow Conservatory. This was in memory of Pavel Messner, one of their most famous teachers, who died five years ago. So spent the evening in slight disconnect, reverberating slightly with shock under the splendour of an electric chandelier, listening to the most exquisite piano music.

Both Messner's daughter and grandaughter were there, the latter's stage debut aged 10; she played Chopin, as beautifully and  affectingly as could be imagined (see above, isn't she just sooo sweet!). Otherwise there was Rachmaninov and Brahms and Schubert - as someone extremely unmusical  I learnt a lot about just how much drama you can get from a piano or two.

The other highlight was hearing the contemporary Russian composer Alexander Rosenblatt playing a couple of his own pieces. Concertino on 2 Russian themes for 4 hands (view here on YouTube) was completely unexpected in the way it sampled other music.  Is this common for contemporary classic music either here or elsewhere? The audience loved it, and so did I.

City bingo 5: concert posters for (ex)rock stars - need I say more?

Tried out the opera for the first time, where, at the Novaya Opera anyway, tickets are extraordinarily cheap at 200 roubles (about 4 pounds/7 dollars/4.50 euros). Went to see the Magic Flute. Don't know much about opera, so not sure how much the weirdness was inherent in Mozart's original - the story is pretty all over the place and meant to have a bit of a pantomine quality -and how much was a particularly Russian interpretation. Suffice to say that the sorcerer character was Stalin (Bad guy? Good guy?) and his surrounding chorus henchmen wore trilbys, black suits and hammers.  The heroine, meanwhile, had a red cardboard sickle velcroed to her hair for much of it, and there were many very literal moments (a large 'magic flute' - with wings - hanging centre stage) and  quite a lot of random events. Why oh why did the henchmen throw red stuffed animals at the hero at one stage, or did the wicked queen suddenly 'grow' an extra-large leg? And pity the two baritones who were wrapped up in silver foil, together with their cardboard box plinths, as 'Stalin' statues - so could only hobble very slowly and oddly across the stage and had to do a kind of sideways flop in order to be carried off. All in all, given that the singing was very good, a great if slightly surprising night out.

Alexey Kozlov

Went to hear a Russian jazz legend last week, saxophonist Alexey Kozlov, with his band the New Arsenal. Whilst jazz wasn't banned in the Soviet period, non-'regular' musicians (the cultural underground) did get constantly hounded by the KGB. Some of Kozlov's tunes are about this very thing, which cannot have endeared him then, and the experience of which clearly remains central to how he still sees himself today. 

He is a fantastic player, not just living off a previous reputation, although the band takes a bit of time to get fully into their stride. It says on the website that he was born in 1935, so he is in good form (if a bit haggard) - although I guess many jazz musicians seem to last a very long time. 

 

You can listen so some music here: www.arsenalband.com or go and see them play Thursdays, starting 8.30 at the Forte Club on Bolshaya Bronnaya str.,29 (in Russian Бол. Бронная ул.)