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Previews

‘I Am… Sasha Fierce’

Beyoncé Knowles is an American R&B singer who gradually attained fame through singing and dancing competitions in childhood, then became the lead singer of the R&B girl group Destiny’s Child in the 1990s. Today Beyoncé has a strong solist career with albums: Dangerously in Love released in 2003, B’Day (2006) and finally I Am… Sasha Fierce released in November 2008, inspiring Beyoncé to do a world tour. According to critics from Northern America who have already seen the show, it promises to become one of the best concert shows of 2009,

Sports Complex Olimpiysky
November 2
19:00

something that was confirmed in a recent statement from the Billboard magazine ranking it among the top 15 grossing tours of the year. As an addition to Beyoncé’s real hits from latest and previous discs, Thierry Mugler – a famous French designer was invited to work not only on the costumes for the show but the whole visual concept for the show and the video clips for TV.

New at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

One if the things that museums do as institutions of the arts is preserve art traditions, trying to be unique or at least to possess collections that other arts institutions don’t possess. There are different ways to obtain such collections: government support, sponsors, auctions, donators... It’s extremely rare for museums to mount exhibitions of new items which they have acquired. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is now displaying in its section of ancient Eastern Arts various new exhibits. One of these: an ancient Palestinian vessel was presented by the director of the museum, Irina Antonova, herself. The section of Old European Masters has been enriched with the works of a Dutch painter Gysbrecht van der Kuyl (1604-1673). His “Musicians” is a superb example of late-Caravaggio-style Northern European painting. The graphics department features a collection of Claude Lorrain’s etchings. He was an engraver whose career was closely connected to both France and Italy. There is a gorgeous collection given to the museum of Japanese woodcuts in the ukiyo manner – literally translated as “floating world” from Japanese, presenting precise compositions of a Japanese woodcut printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and others. An exhibition of the Japanese applied arts enjoyed huge success at the museum a couple of years ago; no doubt such success will be repeated this time.

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts &
Museum of Private Collections

Volkhonka 12, Volkhonka 10
Open: 10: 00-19:00
Except Monday

The museum has bene# ted greatly from a donation of work of a great Russian and Soviet photographer and designer – Alexander Rodchenko. Thanks to his grandson Alexander Lavrentyev’s donation, the Pushkin Museum now has one of the biggest public collections of this great avant-garde trend-setter of the 20th century. The Pushkin Museum’s Museum of Private Collections is worth checking out.

Dance, Dance, Dance

Goran Bregovic and his Wedding and Funeral Band are similar to the Japanese haiku that lasts into the late autumn. Goran Bregovic was born in Sarajevo, studied violin at the conservatory and committed his love for rock n’roll by forming The White Button group at the age of sixteen. Since then he has composed for such varied artists as Iggy Pop and Cesaria Evora. Together with the film director and musician Emir Kusturica, Bregovic has become known internationally for his scores for the latter’s films (Time of the Gypsies, Arizona Dream, Underground – Palme d’Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival). Together with his ensemble of more than 50 people,

B1 Maximum
November 4
21:00

Bregovic performs a repertoire of Balkan folk arrangements infused with his own musical ingredients, finding inspiration in the raw energy of brass-powered gypsy bands. During his show, musicians come out one after another and fill the whole stage, and when they all begin to sing, play, and dance, it becomes impossible for the audience to stay still. This autumn Bregovic is back in Moscow with the programme of his latest album – Alcohol.

Jay-Jay Johansson

The first experiment combining light, visual arts and music on stage was made at the beginning of the 20th century by composer Mikhail Matyushin, by librettist Aleksei Kruchonykh and Kazimir Malevich who was responsible for lighting, sets and costumes. This was during the Futurist opera: Victory over the Sun”premiered in 1913 at Luna Park in Saint Petersburg. Frankly speaking, to contemporary listeners their show was quite a shock, yet the idea proved vivacious in later days. So nowadays the visual is a great part of U2’s concert show for example, MTV movies are the applied principle of music plus visual. Jay-Jay Johansson, a well-known singer from Sweden, and in some media sometimes described as a performer from the future, presents his other talents – those of a photographer and a painter. During over fifteen years of his successful musical career he designed all the covers for his albums, directed his own videos and participated in

Rodchenko School of Photography
November 5 – 19
Open: 10:00-19:00
www.rodchenko-school.ru  

different exhibitions as a photographer. His exhibition is entitled Cluster and and is presented in several chapters. The first one – Drift is a series of still lifes created in different medias – photo and video. The second chapter conveys us more through Johansson’s own selfportraits. The others – landscapes and graphics – are to frame the exposition. Remaining a true musiacian, Johansson made a special soundtrack, Harmonium.

BAM: Soviet romanticism with spikes and spades

There existed thousands of rhymes to the Russian abbreviation BAM or Baikal-Amur Mainline in romances and songs young komsomoltsi had enough time to compose during their travel to construction sites. The first plans to construct a railway route alternative to the Trans-Siberian Railway appeared at the end of the 19th century. Under Stalin it was gradually continued from Tayshet to Bratsk and finished uncompleted after his death. It was Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev who revived BAM to the Soviet people as “the construction project of the century” at the beginning of the 70s and by implication became the author of those

Manezh
Open: 11:00 – 20:00
except Monday
November 4 – December 22
www.mdf.ru  

romantic Komsomol and not romantic real life songs. Eight photographers present their works at Manezh: Gennady Koposov, Valery Koreshkov, Viktor Akhlomov, Dmitry Baltermants, Yury Rost, Alexander Abaza and Arkady Shaikhet. They all worked for leading Soviet media and consequently followed their criteria. After an avant-garde idea of supplying Red Army soldiers with photo cameras, the principal genre became photomontage; turning the unreal into the real and thus displacing normal photography for some time. Soviet photojournalism was influenced by this for a considerable period of time.

Photographic sketch by Yury Abramochkin

The more digitalized the modern generation becomes in terms of photography, the more precious and exclusive become photographs made from films, developed, dried and manually printed in lightrooms... The Lumiere Brothers gallery knows that well and remains attached to analogue prints especially by esteemed masters of photography. For our generation, again, so absorbed in the modern rule of reading gaudy advertising images and recognising brands a visit to this photographers’exhibition of black and white photographs of the minimalistic 60s must be a relief to the eyes. Yury Abramochkin would not have become accepted to the State News Agency if it had not been for the Festival of Youth that took place in 1957 in Moscow. Yury, then a young student himself, brought some photographs he was taking with an old FED camera – a present from his father to the agency where George Zelma, Mikhail Ozersky, Abram Sterenberg and other photographers – stars of the Soviet photojournalism worked. Though Abramochkin describes himself as a fidgeter turning from one hobby to another, photography has obviously remained the passion of his life. Some see his

Lumiere brothers Gallery
Open: 10:00 – 19:00 except Monday
November 11 – December 13
www.lumiere.ru  

best works as being his photographs of fishermen at the Baikal or reindeer herders in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. As a political reporter Abramochkin visited many countries and photographed political leaders from Nikita Khruschev to Dmitry Medvedev, Queen Elisabeth to Fidel Castro, choosing along with protocol portraits “interim” shots that sometimes illustrate and frame a situation best. The current exhibition presents photographs manually printed by Maestro himself.







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