MALVERN HILLS DECORATIVE AND FINE ARTS SOCIETY

RUSSIAN ART UNDER THE LAST TSAR

Russian secular culture took a long time in coming to maturity: for centuries it was dominated by the Orthodox church, then it was forced to emulate Western styles and techniques. Under Nicholas II, the last Tsar, however, the arts flourished like never before, fuelled by Russia’s belated embrace of capitalism, and the knowledge that this was a society on the edge of a volcano (which erupted in 1917).

This lecture looks at how fearless young Russian artists shocked polite society with their revolutionary exhibitions of radical new work, and boldly became leaders of the European avant-garde. It looks at the role played by Diaghilev’s epoch-making Ballets Russes, which followed Wagner’s example in creating a synthesis of the arts, and made stars of Chaliapin, Nijinsky and Stravinsky along the way. It examines how Kandinsky and Scriabin strode boldly into abstraction and atonality, and how at the same time a more conservative artist like Rachmaninov steadfastly resisted the path of the new by writing brooding symphonies and sacred choral works, whose melodies speak of his passionate attachment to his native land.

DR ROSAMUND BARTLETT

Rosamund Bartlett has a doctorate from Oxford, and is currently Visiting Professor at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, and Visiting Research Fellow in the Music Department at King's College London. Also teaches in the Department of Music Studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and at the University of Oxford.

Her books include Wagner and Russia (Cambridge UP), Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (Free Press), Literary Russia: A Guide (co authored with Anna Benn), and Shostakovich in Context (Oxford, 2000). Also writes for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Cambridge History of Russia, and articles for leading journals and publications including The Times Literary Supplement, The Economist and The Guardian, and worked extensively as a translator: her Chekhov anthology About Love and Other Stories (Oxford UP, 2004) was shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her new book is Tolstoy: A Russian Life, published in November 2010, to mark the centenary of Tolstoy′s death, and she is currently translating Anna Karenina for Oxford World′s Classics.

Lectures at the Royal Opera House, the National Gallery, the V&A, the South Bank and Barbican Centres and broadcasts on the BBC and on Russian national radio. Regularly invited to accompany tours throughout Europe and first travelled to Russia in 1978. Founder Director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, set up to preserve the Chekhov House Museum in Yalta.