One step beyond....

Malcolm Bradbury, in his all-too accurate spoof guidebook to the Warsaw pact countries of the 1980s,'Why Come to Slaka?' was perhaps the first to elaborate on the toxic potential of the national operas of Central and Eastern Europe. I have been caught before by these - notably by Paliashvili's 'Absalom and Eteri' in Tbilisi, some hours of excruciating tedium - but ever eager to explore repertoire unknown to me, and hoping that I might stumble on the exception to the rule, I went to Kyiv's excellent opera house to hear 'Zaporozhets za Dunayem' by Semyon Gulak-Artyemovsky (don't ask 'who he?' - I had never heard of him before and won't bother if I never do again). Problems start with the title, which means 'The Zaporozhye Cossack beyond the Danube' - the plot, such as it is, dealing with a Cossack settlement in the the late 18th century Ottoman Empire (i.e. on the 'wrong side' of the Danube), whence they had been driven by.....well, the opera doesn't explain what they were doing there. That's partly because its problems began when it was written in the 1860s, when the Tsar's censors didn't want any references to historic disputes with Turkey....you see, you're bored already, and I haven't even started on the opera itself. The only slightly interesting bit was a set of Cossack dances in Act II, and even those were not original I suspect but had been inserted in a desperate bid to keep the audience awake. Needless to say the locals loved it all. I hope I don't get deported for dissing it like this.

Fortunately the musical balance was redeemed by a performance the next day at the Philharmonia by a young Ukrainian string quartet, who go under the unusual name of 'Post Scriptum'. They have a wonderfully sweet tone, and gave the best live performance of Tchaikovsky's 1st Quartet I have ever heard, together with a passionate rendition of Schubert's 'Death and the Maiden' and an engaging account of Schumann's 3rd. I am hoping we may be able to get them to perform at the 2010 Levoca music festival.