Family friends of mine in Moscow have a Dacha near the birder with Belarus, about a 90 minute drive south from Moscow. Driving out of any of Russia’s cities for more than 30 minutes immediately gets you out into the countryside, and the Russian village way of life immediately takes over.
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This is something I really want to learn how to do.
The Art of Sabrage is perhaps the greatest legend in the history of Champagne. The story has it that Napoleon Bonaparte’s cavalry, the Hussards, began the Art of Sabrage, a technique to behead a bottle of Champagne with a sabre or sword. When Madame Clicquot entertained Napoleon’s officers in her vineyard, she offered them bottles of Champagne. At sunrise the Hussards rode off on horseback and whipped out their sabres to behead the bottles in order to impress the young widow.
Sabrage however requires technique, or it can go horribly – and painfully wrong.

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Catherine the Great was a great art lover and was responsible for introducing opera to Russia, hiring many important Italian composers to produce operas specifically for the Court and for consumption throughout the country. The development lineage of opera in Russia is quite unique; the first opera shown in Russia was “Calandro” by Giovanni Ristori and was presented in Moscow in 1731. After that, many Italians, including the renowned Francesco Araja, decamped to St. Petersburg to write operas, in Italian, but featuring Russian motifs. Araja spent 25 years in St.Petersburg and wrote an astonishing fourteen operas specifically for Russia. Many are now lost or forgotten, however Cecilia Bartolli’s recent CD, simply titled “St.Petersburg” which was researched at the Hermitage and Mariinsky archives and documents many of the arias from this period; including some of Araja’s work.

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Tchaikovsky’s opera “The Queen of Spades” – after the Pushkin novel, is quite rightly accorded genius status in Russia, yet is only sporadically aired in the West, where audiences seem to prefer the unrequited love angst of Eugene Onegin. Perhaps it needs a Russian maestro and setting to bring out the best of the production, but for me any story that involves ghosts, gambling, a doomed heroine and the disgrace of addiction along with a murder has got to be worth the entrance money.

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Serge Prokofiev was, along with Dmitri Shoshtakovich, one of the Soviet Union’s greatest composers, and along with his rival possessed a fierce sense of the ridiculous. The 1920s and 30’s were a time for avant garde expressionism and this opera examines this in detail. Princesses being born from Oranges? Silly Marches? It’s almost Pythonesque in its absurd surrealism.

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The beautiful Albina Shagimuratova, another up and coming opera singer in an intimate recital tonight, with a set of Arias by Bellini, Donizetti (the ‘mad’ scene from Lucia di Lammermoor) and Romances by Rachmaninov. Again, I find these intimate settings a great leveler, the chance to hear a powerful singer in a more delicate setting – two hands, one voice.

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The Mariinsky’s annual White Nights Festival takes in not just opera and ballet but also more intimate performances. Hence we have the wonderful mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Semenchuk – usually to be seen on stage performing Boris Gudonov, the Queen of Spades, Valkyrie, Il Trovadore and so on, presenting some of the 19th century Russian salon romances.
Graduating from the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in St.Petersburg, she is one of the new batch of global operatic stars, and sang at Prince Charles wedding to Camilla Parker-Bowles.

Russian romances however are a different ball game – tales of doomed love, unrequited love, passionate love and odes to both the joys and despairs of life, they are often miniatures in cameo; a blend of piano and emotion that comes through in extraordinary clarity of nuance. It helps that Russian is a very powerful and romantic language.

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I’m a big balletomane and especially of the Russian ballet school; it’s one of the reasons I have an apartment in St.Petersburg. The Mariinsky is possibly the worlds greatest ballet troupe, and especially now the Bolshoi is caught up in political and financial scandals. Under Valery Gergiev the Mariinsky is a living institution; it commissions new works as well as offer tickets at a very reasonable price. The average age attending is 32 – at New Yorks Met it is 70. Hence it is common at the Mariinsky to see young schoolgirls and their young Mothers attending the ballet as well as elderly Babushka’s – it is art for the people, not just the elite as it has become in the United States and is in danger of doing so in London.

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I have arrived back at my St.Petersburg apartment, where true to form the White Nights are in full extension; this is the view from my balcony overlooking Maneznaya (Horse Riding) Square, with the Mikhailovsky Palace Stables just across the road. This photo was taken at 11pm.

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From March onwards the weather begins to build up along the southern coast of Sri Lanka, becoming progressively hotter and humid. These are electric days, the hum of not just the overhead ceiling fan but of the air conditioner hard at work. The sunlight is biting this far south, and the watery atmosphere although ideal for plants, is uncomfortable for mammals. So much so that between 11am and 3pm the garden is silent – nothing stirs and even the birdlife takes a siesta.

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