Word: cossack
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Convincing Soviet citizens that Raisa will be different may be difficult. She is not about to play the dutiful housewife, puttering contentedly around the Gorbachev dacha alongside Rublevskoye Highway west of Moscow. In her doctoral dissertation she recorded these words from a cossack folk song: "Go play, young girl, while you are still free." Raisa will have her fun. And if Soviet public opinion or the exigencies of domestic politics force her to curb her activities at home, she will always be a hit on the road. All she has to do is switch on her strobe-light smile...
...sturdy showpiece that picks up momentum from its opening recitative to its blazing vivo finale; it got an otherworldly performance from Soloist Sergei Stadler, a baby-faced firebrand who shared first prize in the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition with Viktoria Mullova. Sergei Slonimsky's sprightly two-minute Novgorod Dance -- hellzapoppin', cossack- style, ending with the clarinetist, trombonist, cellist, pianist and conductor all merrily hoofing it around the stage -- bespeaks a composer with both an ear and a sense of humor. Best of all is Schnittke's silvery Three Scenes for Soprano and Chamber Ensemble (1981), a theater piece for percussionists, soprano...
First coffee--in the form of Spanish dancers, castanets in hand--and then tea--sensuous gymnasts whose physical stunts amaze. Cossack dancers kick and flip over the stage. Chinese dancers come with small attendants who wave long, sinuous orange silk banners. Tutued marzipan with silly caps and then roses, with skirts of petals...
...This pro-cossack school generally aligns itself with Izvestia's West Coast theory of American baseball. In this opinion, the first American team was not the Cincinnati Reds but the Los Angeles Engels, named for the wealthy crony who liked to toss the lapta around with Karl Marx, the first great theoretician of the game and the main reason why so many modern lapta stars have been nicknamed Lefty. Marx and Engels introduced the dialectical theory of lapta: the pitchers are always ahead of the hitters, and vice versa. Marx's classic one-liner about lapta, "Nice right-wing deviationists...
...must have become very ill, because I cannot imagine any healthy person wanting to leave. Whether floating across the stage in huge black robes, acting out a patriotic defense of the homeland, or just doing those low Cossack kicks, the dancers rarely lost my normally dance-defying attention. The only inexplicable piece was an overlong sequence in which the dancers pretended they were skating on a Russian ice rink, even executing fake spins. Very impressive. The Ice Capades must not have reached Moscow...