Word: russian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...proof, consider "Making Music Together," an ambitious three-week festival currently thriving in Boston. Conceived jointly by Sarah Caldwell, the visionary leader of the Opera Company of Boston, and Russian Composer Rodion Shchedrin, the $4.6 million event features some 500 Soviet and American musicians, composers and dancers in an exhaustive survey of contemporary Soviet musical thinking. (Next year Caldwell & Co. will journey to Moscow for a reciprocal visit.) Despite an improvisatory, hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-show atmosphere, the festival offers an unparalleled opportunity to hear and assess the state of new Soviet music and performance...
...start my policy toward Russia from here, from the hurt" -- he holds his aching fighter's sides -- "and move on out toward them." Protecting against the body blows, he argues, will make America stronger against the Russian Bear. "We've been leading with our left, with our left" -- he jabs, repeated, automatic. "Always military first, not economic, not diplomatic...
Nose clearly owes a lot to the Russian folk tale tradition of the nebuival'shchina, or humorous tall tale. Duffy takes advantage of the story's fairy-tale quality and frames his adaptation around the premise of a group of adults (Arthur Fuscaldo, Lee Thomsen and Maria Troy) performing the tale to pacify a difficult little girl (Annie Gustavsen) who has locked herself in a basement room, Happily, this device manages not to cross the boundary from charm to terminal cuteness, and while you may occasionally feel like a little malchik being tucked into bed by your babushka...
...oeuvre. Like Nose, it traces the daily struggles of a St. Petersburg bureaucrat. Diary's audience, however, does not get a humorous look at a silly, petty outsider but dwells within the mind of a man tortured by his own lowly position within the inflexible class lines of Russian society and accompanies him on his gradual descent into a hell of madness and self-torment...
...narrator, with his sheared hair, unshaven face and ripped pajamas, appears a convincing lunatic. Moreover, he delivers his many long monologues with the curious self-absorption of a madman, drawing the audience into his twisted world where dogs write letters, the earth is crashing into the moon and a Russian bureaucrat can discover that he's actually the king of Spain. As he loses himself more and more in his delusions, the real pain behind his situation becomes clear, and the audience realizes that class boundaries separate him forever from the general's daughter with whom he has fallen...