On Sunday (6/16) at the AFP news service, Stuart Williams writes about Musica Aeterna, a Russian orchestra located in Perm, “a thousand kilometres from Moscow, deep in Russia’s Urals…. [The orchestra’s] presence in a region known in Russia as a backwater complete with a notorious network of Soviet-era prison camps is part of one of the most audacious cultural projects in post-Soviet Russia.… Just two years after [Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis] arrived with his orchestra in 2011, the Perm Theatre picked up more nominations and prizes at Russia’s top Golden Mask arts awards in 2013 than either the Bolshoi or the Mariinsky in Saint Petersburg…. The Mariinsky (then known as Kirov) ballet company was evacuated to Perm from Saint Petersburg during World War II and spent four seasons in the city, leaving behind one of Russia’s best ballet schools.… Currentzis was appointed in 2011 as part of a drive by the former Perm region governor Oleg Chirkunov known as the ‘Perm cultural revolution’ to turn the city into an international cultural hub…. But since Chirkunov resigned in 2012, many of the city’s more ambitious projects for urban regeneration have fallen by the wayside. According to its general director Marc de Mauny, the theatre is now facing tricky and potentially fateful [budget] negotiations.”
Posted June 17, 2013
