The celebrated star of the Bolshoi, Nikolai Tsiskaridze, has been told his contracts will not be renewed when they expire at the end of this month - an effective dismissal for Russia's flamboyant and outspoken ballet icon.
If you look at a map of Russia, you will find the city of Perm just west of the spine of the Ural Mountains which divides European Russia from Asia, about 720 miles north-east of Moscow. Just under two hours away by plane, you only understand the reality of its remoteness going there by Russian train: 24 hours’ slow chug through endless forests of silver birch, pines and bog, only occasionally enlivened by the startling yellow of kingcups. You feel yourself being translated into a different dimension.
The last two years have seen the Tiger Lillies hit a prolific peak of activity, to be found as often on the theatrical as the concert stage, drawing on plenty of influences from outside the UK to boot.
On most of her London visits, Elisabeth Leonskaja has been an unassuming high priestess of the mysteries and depths in core sonatas by Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert. This time she applied her Russian-school style of orchestral pianism, tempered as always by absolute clarity, to burning the mists off Ravel, Debussy and the French-inspired Romanian, Enescu. She went on to give us colossal enlightenment in what must be the greatest work ever composed by a 19-year-old, Brahms’s Third Piano Sonata in F minor.
Man is, of course, the worst monster of all in this bleak, post-apocalyptic first-person shooter based on the best-selling "Metro" novels of Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. In Metro: Last Light, the last few of mankind are bunkered down in the old Moscow Metro stations, while the surface is only briefly navigable with a gasmask, and populated mostly by irradiated mutant creatures.
Where there’s a stoker there must be a furnace, and this being Russian director Alexei Balabanov’s latest story from St Petersburg’s gangster 1990s, as well as heating some snow-bound Soviet industrial hulks, its flames also conveniently consume whatever corpses the local criminal gang brings in.
Russian director Karen Shakhnazarov has three decades of memorable film-making behind him, but remains much less known than he should be, at least in the English-speaking world: his edgy perestroika-era films like Courier and Assassin of the Tsar deserve far more atttention than they've generally received. Last year's White Tiger reunites him with longtime co-scripter Alexander Borodnyansky, and this time they've aimed resolutely for the mainstream, though it's a bid for the popular with an unusual twist.
Backed up by reasonably adventurous orchestral programming, lucky conductors can forge a strong Stravinsky evening by picking and mixing from his five ancient Greek rituals. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, unintentionally homaging the late Sir Colin Davis who at least in earlier days would have jumped to such a pairing, chose to celebrate his 70th birthday with the extremes of white balletic lyric poem Apollon musagète and hard-hitting blackest tragedy Oedipus Rex.
They’re back, and this time it’s Gorky.
General booking for the Bolshoi Ballet's Covent Garden season this summer opens on Tuesday (9 April), and the company has at last announced its intended casting. However, it should always be borne in mind that, as Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo habitually announce before every performance, "in accordance with strict Russian tradition, there may be changes".