Teodor Ioannovich and the Contemporary Viewer's Workshop

Sometimes, if you want a thing hard enough, it happens. Not always, but it's worth going on hoping: things do happen, and occasionally more of them than you asked for. Which makes it better still.

Currentzis lived in Perm once, and didn't only live there but worked on people's behalf, trying to turn the place from a provincial backwater into a modern cultural centre. Others had tried; not all of them managed it. He did. He brought in people from abroad, put on things ordinary people could actually get to, and those people came out better for it. Somebody evidently disliked that, and the devil of Russian theatre was dispatched to St. Petersburg, where he'd been a student.

We'll see how long our officials hold out, and whether Teodor Ioannovich sets about wearing down the minds of the Petersburg intelligentsia by siege.

I understand it's all far more prosaic in reality: somebody couldn't agree on money, somebody said the wrong thing at the wrong moment, and that will stay behind seven locks. But it's pleasant to think occasionally that art isn't made purely for profit, even though nearly everyone needs some return — you can't exist without money. And it's clear why Currentzis is now running concerts at that scale: Dom Radio, where he does his experiments, needs maintaining, renting, and thinking about. It seems to work out well for almost everyone.

Entirely free to attend, his team runs the Contemporary Viewer's Workshop — precisely the care for the person on the receiving end that's been missing for so long. Explaining simple things in plain language, raising someone's cultural and intellectual level, so they'll come back to the theatre and won't complain about the absence of period-accurate costumes. Teodor obviously can't keep an eye on everything, and some of it does fall flat.

I got to two lectures. The first was a genuine disappointment: the Beethoven lecturer ran it like a university seminar, the sort where the teacher has no particular interest in making anyone love the subject. I'm talking about the majority — there are plenty of exceptions, and more often it's tired people with outdated ideas who simply got unlucky.

The conversation with the sound producer, a working professional, did come off, thankfully. You hardly want to call it a lecture; it was a conversation about everything, including the subject. He worked from his own experience, imposed nothing, and talked for about two hours in a completely relaxed room — and none of it was filler, but weighed, rational thinking and facts. I arrived sceptical and left inspired, and that, I think, is exactly the emotion Currentzis's space is meant to produce: somewhere free, where art can be argued about.

To get in you have to give up your phone. Knowledge has to be alive and worth something, and the route to it runs through the stern corridors of Dom Radio. And for a good while afterwards you can't quite come down from what you've just been given.