Islamey

Balakirev's Islamey (arr Zhyltsov)

..on an acccordion (h/t Kip W on rmcr). Apart from the hair-raisingly fast parts I thought the arrangement was especially effective in the slow atmospheric parts of the work.

Delvig, Delvig!

Now here's something Good Friday-ish, from Dmitri Shostakovich's bleakest Symphony - No 14 - it really is a song cycle on a series of poems around the theme of death, comes this setting of a poem by Küchelbecker.

Küchelbecker was a Russian poet who saw exile under one corrupt Russian regime, Shostakovich experienced constant harrassment from another corrupt - now Soviet regime. I'm sure there was some empathetic feeling in these words:

O Delvig, Delvig! What is the reward
for lofty deeds and poetry?
For talent what comfort is there
among villains and fools?

A cynical, old composer, but he, in the end draws something of a consolation in this setting.

The Return

At the Silk Screen on Wednesday we saw Zvyagintsev's 'The Return' a tale of the arrival, out of the blue, of a husband and father after 12 years absence. You never find out why he was away and the story follows a trip as he takes his sons to the sea in Northern Siberia. Lots of things are unexplained and the viewer ends up almost as puzzled as the teenage children. The Observer review is here, one review commented on the resemblance to Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también - a long secretive road trip to a beach -I picked up on that but, for me, the larger similarity was to Io non ho paura (and here's that film's wikipedia page), its fascination with nature, great skyscapes especially clouds and the wind in the trees, not to mention children on an edge of adult events they just didn't understand. I was put off by one of the committee's quick summary, a week before the showing, the reality was very worth while! Here's the trailer:

Dead Russian Composers

If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Considered the leader of the 19th Century Composer group "The Mighty Handful," I am indeed the teacher among them. My orchestration skills are superbly colorful, and are explained in my book on the topic, but works like "Scheherezade" explain my mastery better. Who would you be? Dead Russian Composer Personality Test

Inevitably it's the one with whom I have least sympathy (well probably as it doesn't tell you who the other possibilities were!)

Five Famous Russian Novels

(or some permutation of those words!)

From this amazon search.
Thanks to Plaible for this! Lots more examples if you look around - apparently some Australian has uploaded a garbled database.

Yum!

Whilst on the Russian theme -

Good enough to eat - hat tip to vrovke. No I still can't read Russian! As the still frame says, it is Verdi's La Traviata.

Rolcats!

Яolcats are here, unfortunately you can't embed the pictures in a blog post (well you can but it is not encouraged like at LOLcats - you want the salt-mines? we can arrange a trip to Northwich!) so you'll just have to go and look at it yourself. Fluency in Russian helps apparently! (link thanks to B3TA)
I think - so far I prefer the current latest one:

Have strength, my little cabbage. By the mercy of NKVD Order No. 00447, we have been chosen for Resettlement.
We will show the tin mines of Kolyma the true power of the proletariat.