Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky and Satie in one evening at the Philharmonic — and a hall that came back to life along with the music.
Where were you, what did you feel? No — the wrong question for any Currentzis concert. It couldn't have happened, and it did, somewhere past the edge of thinking.
Waking up this morning I understood that everything at the Philharmonic last night was real, and that it's landing harder now than it did then.
Teo made a field, a space, and we went into it head first. We came out remade, with room for feelings we didn't have before.
Often enough you go looking for the bad note, the thing that's off — I couldn't find one. The opposite: my sense of proportion, from the first light touch of Debussy onward, wasn't broken once.
Maybe the clarity blinded me, but the Ravel came through just as gently and cleanly. Then the ice came down and Stravinsky hit — polished, and clearly played many times before.
Odd as it sounds, the best of it turned out to be the audience. It had been far too long since I'd seen people in that state, and I was glad to see it again.
We don't know each other and probably never will. But we went through a great deal together and felt it together. Everyone took away something of their own, and it was certainly beautiful — as fine as the Satie played as an encore in that hall on Italianskaya Street.
And I'm sure it'll sound again the next time we're all in one room. Whether that turns out to be true is another matter.
Elia Suleiman made a film whose hero changes almost nothing — which is exactly what leaves you alone with your own conclusions.
Not a recommendation but an attempt to think it through — written straight after the run at the Lensoviet Theatre.
How "Robot Kostya" came about — Russia's first robotic theatre production, where it turned out Chekhovian passions were within a robot's range after all.
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