My day was more than half done by the time I left the house. To begin with, I woke up not too early in the morning, around 9am. Then, and this is the part where I would do even David Copperfield proud, I just managed to lose the next six hours.
Granted, I may have come home late last night after seeing Shoot 'Em Up (2007), which stars Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Belucci at Oktyabr. But waking up at 9am is a given on a Saturday morning. Maybe it was the time spend concentrated on writing replies to my requests for couches in Israel and the Palestinian Territories that took so much of my time. Or napping now and then most certainly didn't help.
Anyway, by the time I had gotten out, I had less than a quarter of an hour to get from here to 5-Zvyozd in Novokuznetskaya to see the multi-awarded film by Ramil Salakhutdinov, Kruzhenie v Predelakh Koltsevoy (2006). I don't know why Moscow Times described the film, whose English title is "Cruising the Ring Road", as having been shot in the 1970s and 1980s. To my consternation, this 112-min film was almost as sparse as a Dogme 95 film without the arthouse pretentiousness and intellectual-snobbishness rights to go along with it. Starring Dmitry Vorobyov, Elena Popova, Oleg Kovalov and Svetlana Pisminenko, it had some Cronenberg-ish elements in its telling of the lives of various Muscovites who are united, despite their social status and wealth, by the banality of their problems.
Anyway I almost barely finished the film, having had to rush out and get myself a ham-and-cheese bliny before passing by the flat, where I managed in 10mins to get my cardigan and invite Frederic to come along. To compound matters, there was an artificial traffic just in front of the Foreign Ministry that held us back for around 5mins. We managed to find parking on one of the Conservatory side streets before we met up with Lyolya and Richard, an English teacher in Moscow for 18 months now.
It was Lyolya who invited me to see the National Russia Youth Choir perform at Rachmaninov Hall in the Moscow State Conservatory of Music at 8pm last night. The concert, which was open to friends and relatives of the choir members, was entitled Khorovye Vechera Borisa Tevlina (An Evening with the Choir of Boris Tevlin).
The choir was just splendid, even to my exacting Philippine tastes. Conducted by National Russsian Artist and State Prize Laureate Boris Tevlin, the Chamber Choir of the Moscow Conservatory (composed of around 25 remarkable voice majors, including one from China and another from Vietnam) sang 16 songs in an intermission-free concert of 90mins.
The program is as follows: Vocalise (Narodniy Plach) from the film King Lear, composed by Dmitry Shostakovich; Sonnet 97 by William Shakespeare, How like a winter hath my
absence been, composed by K. Volkov and translated into Russian by S. Marshaka: Mne pokazalos, chto byla zima; and Bezhenka, a rendition by Rodion Shchedrin of a poem by A. Voznesensky. Other songs by Shchedrin, who is living in Munich with his wife Maya Plisetskaya, are the tremulous Kazn' Pugacheva, a poem for an a cappella chorus from the words of Alexander Pushkin in "History of Pugachev"; and Solfeggio.
(To follow)
Granted, I may have come home late last night after seeing Shoot 'Em Up (2007), which stars Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Belucci at Oktyabr. But waking up at 9am is a given on a Saturday morning. Maybe it was the time spend concentrated on writing replies to my requests for couches in Israel and the Palestinian Territories that took so much of my time. Or napping now and then most certainly didn't help.
Anyway, by the time I had gotten out, I had less than a quarter of an hour to get from here to 5-Zvyozd in Novokuznetskaya to see the multi-awarded film by Ramil Salakhutdinov, Kruzhenie v Predelakh Koltsevoy (2006). I don't know why Moscow Times described the film, whose English title is "Cruising the Ring Road", as having been shot in the 1970s and 1980s. To my consternation, this 112-min film was almost as sparse as a Dogme 95 film without the arthouse pretentiousness and intellectual-snobbishness rights to go along with it. Starring Dmitry Vorobyov, Elena Popova, Oleg Kovalov and Svetlana Pisminenko, it had some Cronenberg-ish elements in its telling of the lives of various Muscovites who are united, despite their social status and wealth, by the banality of their problems.
Anyway I almost barely finished the film, having had to rush out and get myself a ham-and-cheese bliny before passing by the flat, where I managed in 10mins to get my cardigan and invite Frederic to come along. To compound matters, there was an artificial traffic just in front of the Foreign Ministry that held us back for around 5mins. We managed to find parking on one of the Conservatory side streets before we met up with Lyolya and Richard, an English teacher in Moscow for 18 months now.
It was Lyolya who invited me to see the National Russia Youth Choir perform at Rachmaninov Hall in the Moscow State Conservatory of Music at 8pm last night. The concert, which was open to friends and relatives of the choir members, was entitled Khorovye Vechera Borisa Tevlina (An Evening with the Choir of Boris Tevlin).
The choir was just splendid, even to my exacting Philippine tastes. Conducted by National Russsian Artist and State Prize Laureate Boris Tevlin, the Chamber Choir of the Moscow Conservatory (composed of around 25 remarkable voice majors, including one from China and another from Vietnam) sang 16 songs in an intermission-free concert of 90mins.
The program is as follows: Vocalise (Narodniy Plach) from the film King Lear, composed by Dmitry Shostakovich; Sonnet 97 by William Shakespeare, How like a winter hath my
absence been, composed by K. Volkov and translated into Russian by S. Marshaka: Mne pokazalos, chto byla zima; and Bezhenka, a rendition by Rodion Shchedrin of a poem by A. Voznesensky. Other songs by Shchedrin, who is living in Munich with his wife Maya Plisetskaya, are the tremulous Kazn' Pugacheva, a poem for an a cappella chorus from the words of Alexander Pushkin in "History of Pugachev"; and Solfeggio.
(To follow)
