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    Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet--From the Rule of the Tsars to Today
    Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet--From the Rule of the Tsars to Today
    Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet--From the Rule of the Tsars to Today
    Audiobook17 hours

    Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet--From the Rule of the Tsars to Today

    Written by Simon Morrison

    Narrated by Paul Boehmer

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    On January 17, 2013, a hooded assailant hurled acid into the face of the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, making international headlines. A lead soloist, enraged by institutional power struggles, later confessed to masterminding the crime. The scandal, though shocking, is not an anomaly in the turbulent and tormented yet magnificent history of the Bolshoi. Renowned music historian Simon Morrison reveals the ballet as a crucible of art and politics, beginning with the disreputable inception of the theater in 1776 and proceeding through the era of imperial rule, the chaos of revolution, the oppressive Soviet years, and the recent $680 million renovation project. Drawing on exclusive archival research, Morrison creates a richly detailed tableau of the centuries-long war between world-class art and life-threatening politics that has defined this storied institution. As Morrison makes clear, as Russia goes, so goes the Bolshoi Ballet.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateOct 11, 2016
    ISBN9781681683133
    Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet--From the Rule of the Tsars to Today
    Author

    Simon Morrison

    Simon Morrison is a professor of music at Princeton University, a contributor to the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, and the author of, most recently, The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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    Reviews for Bolshoi Confidential

    3/5

    11 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Bit too long and hard work keeping track of all those names - like a Russian novel! But a fair amount of well-researched stories that takes it above the gossip level. What remains? The story of Plisetskaya's elbowing her way to the top, playing the Soviet system note-perfect. And why the modernising, worker-orientated Communists kept those aristo-bourgeois shows in the repertoire but made so few about tractors and Stakhanovites. Seems they could never agree on the correct marxist message: new ideas died in the committee rooms. And of course there was hard currency potential in Swan Lake and the like. Nonetheless the ballet discipline remains, and the vicious competition behind the scenes.
    • 2/5
      This was one of those books that was so nearly very good, but somehow the author just kept missing open goals, snatching a work of mediocrity from the cusp of success. The basic premise was certainly enticing. In January 2013, Sergei Filin, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet was attacked in a Moscow street. This prompted considerable interest throughout Russia, dominating the press for several weeks, before it emerged that the attack had been organised by a former dancer in the Bolshoi, driven by years of resentment and jealousies seething within the company.Simon Morrison uses this incident as the launching point for a history of the Bolshoi Ballet since its foundation in 1776, as if to demonstrate that this was merely the latest in a long series of such scandals. I found this rather contrived, however, and felt that he was struggling to spin a story out of rather weak material. A simple history of the ballet company without the search for recurrent scandal would have been far more interesting.
    • 3/5
      Mostly about how the politics of Russian interfered with the art.