travelswithalice

July 26, 2017

In three days, we leave this lovely city

In three days, we leave this lovely city for Budapest. My cough should be gone by then. It better be. We go on a river cruise the following week.

I hate to say this but I'm sick again. Once again, I'm on holiday in a fabulous place, and I've got a god awful cough.

We've had to cancel our week in St Petersburg where our hotel room stands empty; they keep emailing us anxiously awaiting our arrival and being "distressed over (my) illness."

We've offered Sergei and his wife our hotel room and tickets to Sunday's IOLANTA at the Mariinsky.

Sergei Akopov akopovsergei.com was our private guide, our brilliant guide two years ago at the Hermitage, solely responsible for our desire to immediately come back and see more of his beautiful country. I wonder if they can use the plane tickets to Moscow too?

It's a beautiful sunny day and I have to content myself with looking out from a wnidow. I've made myself a window seat with cushions from an armchair...lovely soft cushy leather...I think people on the street can see me...they keep looking...yesterday I sat here until evening...

Elina at the Front Office has sent me a sweet get well note along with a huge bowl of fruits and a big plate of fresh berries with lovely fresh cream and icing sugar.

What am I to do with all this food? I still have to deal with my huge breakfast on the trolley...

I seem to get sick a lot while traveling lately. I really must try and get healthier as this cannot keep happening to me!

One thing's certain: if I must be sick on holiday, there's no better place to be than at the gorgeous Ararat Park Hyatt, where everyone wishes me well and takes excellent care of me. From GM Stephen Ansell, to Concierge, to Front Office, to Housekeeping, and to my phone pal Anastasia in Room Service who knows what I want without having to ask.

Labels: Ararat Park Hyatt Moscow, IOLANTA, sick

posted by Alice Dimalanta Jones # July 26, 2017

July 21, 2017

Moscow Diary

From Russia with Love ❤️

Love at first sight: City Center.

Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Nabokov, Pasternak, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Putin.

That's all the Russian I know. Also, das vedanya (which I've since learned should be do svidaniya anyway) and cpacibo. So, everything here is new and exciting!

At the Kremlin, honor guard shoe inspection.

Reaching out to someone on high, the Cathedral of St Basil is certain to catch somebody's attention.

Kitsch and patriots, blinis and caviar at Doctor Zhivago Café.

Camp Russian socialist decor in grand white on white space with bright red accents. Perfect venue for our first outing in Moscow, great introduction to genuine local fare.

At Bolshoi's Le Nozze di Figaro. Brilliant! Most enjoyable opera ever!

The Bolshoi's New Stage.

LavkaLavka Farmer's Market Restaurant.

A foodie mecca - love it! Attractive, cozy space, looks like a barn conversion, consistent with avowed farm-to-table ethos.

Food is tasty, simple, unpretentious, inventive, and fiercely local. Service is friendly, attentive, informed.

The menu names the farm where the particular food was sourced. Lots of game, big and small: lamb, mutton, deer, chicken, duck, goose, and fish like wild halibut, cod, and pike perch. I have yet to discover exactly what "of careful preparation" actually means. This description occurs every so often in some menus.

Wines are Russian or regional. We tried the Crimean wines. Our waiter Sergei brought me a shot of polugar to taste. This is a kind of bread wine- distilled to 38.5% from grains- which he proudly declared to be the elegant "real vodka of Russia," not the rough vodkas most people are familiar with.

Gorky Park.

A real people's park: not grand, human in scale, planned for humans not commerce, usable, enjoyable. Lawns for idling under shade trees, a popular walk-in splash fountain, gardens, paintings, sculptures, and even club music for dancing in the daylight surrounded by friendly graffiti.

Just off the park is a beautiful Russian Orthodox Church set in a garden, an oasis of calm and serenity. My hotel concierge tells me it's the Church of St Nicolas.

A group of ladies, heads covered with scarves, tidied up a lovely flower garden as they hurried to the church door. I followed them in and caught part of a religious service. There were hardly more than a dozen in attendance, a priest and a deacon and two ladies at the organ, intoning responses in soft high-pitched voices. There were curious glances but they didn't seem to mind Stuart and me being there.

Tehnikum Gastropub.

We can't keep away; we even do take-out! Seriously good everyday food, friendly staff, chic young crowd.

There's an extraordinary cutout mural by a local street artist. Downstairs is a secret bar behind a door with a STAFF ONLY sign.

At the fabulous Moscow Metro.

My TROIKA card, key to Moscow's underground palaces for the people.

Komsomolskaya station.

Mayakovskaya station.

Belorusskaya station.

Prospect Mira Station.

Escalators are so long and steep with the deepest station going down almost 280 feet underground.

Novoslobodskaya station.

The Moscow Metro is not just beautiful to look at. Trains are 99.99% on time and go every two minutes at peak times.

So why don't we ask our hardworking Philippine Congress to donate their pay and pork and spend it all on a Manila Metro?

Bolshoi Restaurant.

Beautiful space, grownup decor: chandeliers, high ceilings, Corinthian columns, classic black and white hung with contemporary art, impeccably dressed service staff. A cinema-worthy pastry table stands front and center, glorious and decadent, in the main hall.

Delicious food, staunchly European, good efficient service, live jazzy piano music.

Surprisingly casual crowd for the lavish interior- there were shorts and jeans, mine included, among the evening dresses. Same-day Bolshoi Theatre tickets entitle you to a 5% discount.

White Rabbit Restaurant

A total waste of time. Don't even bother. Save your 400 ruble taxi fare.

The first review I saw on the internet said: "One word: terrible." But the second one said nice things: "...excellent food, good service, etc, etc..." So, we went.

I should've listened to the first one.

Food quality ranged from forgettable to no good. My salad had too much dressing; my main course had too much sauce.

Service was poor. We had to ask for proper dinner napkins. We felt we deserved at least that. A stack of paper serviettes in a tin holder was a bit mean, we thought.

This restaurant is rated 23rd on a list of 50 best restaurants of the world in 2017. Go figure!

At the Bolshoi's Main Hall.

Alas, not the Bolshoi Ballet!

Sigh...

Labels: ballet, food, opera, restaurants, wine

posted by Alice Dimalanta Jones # July 21, 2017

July 20, 2017

Eifman Ballet's Onegin at The Bolshoi

Let me explain. The evening's ballet was a mistake. Mine.

In my rush to see the Bolshoi Ballet perform, in my eagerness to see inside of the Bolshoi's Main Theatre, and in my excitement to finally see a performance of Eugene Onegin even if the opera- not the ballet- would've been my first choice, I neglected to do my homework on this one.

The blurbs just trumpeted that Onegin was returning to the Bolshoi for the first time in seven years! To be sure, there were more dramatic happenings to talk about, particularly last week's shock cancellation, three days before the scheduled world premiere, of the much-anticipated new ballet Nureyev.

I didn't know that the Bolshoi Ballet company was leaving on tour the very next day- spoiler alert! I didn't know that I was not going to a Bolshoi Ballet performance. I didn't know of Boris Eifman or his Eifman Ballet.

I wonder what Pushkin would make of this retelling of his beloved tale. His soaring tale of unrequited young love, ennui, tragedy, regret, and honour among Russia's privileged landowning set.

This was more shocking than I expected, even after reading of the anguish that Pushkin devotees felt about John Cranko's alleged trivialization of Eugene Onegin by turning it into a ballet.

Well, the Eifman Ballet really went to town on this one!

Eifman plays fast and loose with Pushkin's, or for that matter, Cranko's Onegin. The character, here redrawn as an inelegant (maybe sexually ambivalent) first-class brat, loses his way somewhere between the opening number and the "duel scene," where he gets embedded with the "West Side Story" chorus line. It's all downhill from there.

Storyline aside, what did I think of the dancing? Well, skillful the dance moves might be, and they looked torturous, but I expect my ballet to exhilarate, to inspire, to delight, to break my heart, or to be divinely beautiful. This ballet did none of these.

I won't even go into the big production "Thriller"-esque number.

Well, we did see inside the Main Theatre.

Imperial Russia. No sign of the hammer and sickle here. And I do like the chairs!

Labels: Bolshoi Theatre, Eifman Ballet

posted by Alice Dimalanta Jones # July 20, 2017

July 15, 2017

Le Nozze di Figaro at The Bolshoi New Stage

Setting aside the glorious extravagant music for a while, this production for me is a major visual treat. The entire stage is totally watchable: there's action even on the sidelines. Nobody just stands there waiting to sing.

Opera stars these days can act as well as sing and even look the part. Even the trouser role of Cherubino, traditionally played by a female singer dressed intentionally unconvincingly as a man, is played almost straight here. The result is a charming sendup of a libidinous rock-and-rolling teenage boy.

This evening's Figaro too has great dance moves; he's graceful and lithe. That's not to say that his tenor is not of the most superb kind; I'm just more inclined towards the theatrics rather than the operatics of opera. Which is also why I can't drop names as none of the cast names here mean much to me.

This Nozze di Figaro has more in common with Broadway than 18th century opera. Act III's big production number looks like a scene from Grease. (And I mean that in the best possible way.)

Not since the Met's 2013 Rigoletto, dressed in a white tuxedo, grabbed a mic onstage in a casino to sing the aria "Questa o quella" has opera looked so accessible to lay folk like me.

The set design is sheer delight. Scene stages are cleverly stacked in color-blocked boxes like a giant Mondrian. Sets are straight out of a 1950s Hollywood backlot, sunshiny and bright with interiors all citrusy in limes and oranges, and bursts of pumpkin colors in mid-century touches like oversized lampshades, sofa beds, and a retro dial-up telephone with miles of cording.

And the costumes! Alright, I'll come right out about my fixation on over-the-top operatic productions. I like period sets, period costumes. So I was a bit letdown when I saw the posters showing no bouncy wedding-cake ball gowns, towering powdered wigs, or pink-cheeked whiteout faces with heart-shaped beauty marks.

Forget about it! The women's costumes here are such delicious confections: there are frothy Sandra Dee frocks in sherbet colors, razor-sharp pencil-cuts in a deadly serious shade of brilliant blue, and drop-dead Dioresque couture in svelte satin and silks.

An army of eye-candylicious runway-types move stage furniture around, looking like they've stepped out of an Anna Wintour issue mockup.

And the men? Not much to work on here, but they do look stunning in jodhpurs and slicked back hair. Mostly though, they wear various iterations of the Mondrian theme.

But what about the music? You may well ask but you really have to ask someone else. For me, Mozart is Mozart. I am sorely lacking in the chops to pick out the various ways British conductor William Lacey shines in this production.

Ensemble singing in opera buffa may be skillful and exciting but I much prefer bel canto where it's easier for me to understand the beauty of the melody and the voice.

Speaking of understanding, I wish the surtitles were in a language I can understand. Translating Italian to Russian doesn't help me at all.

Music, however, needs no translation. And Mozart is universal.

I come away from The Bolshoi New Stage my head swimming in bright and beautiful scenes, my heart brimming with joyful notes.

Labels: Bolshoi, Mozart, opera

posted by Alice Dimalanta Jones # July 15, 2017

July 14, 2017

Moscow

The thrill of a new destination...early evening arrival on Aeroflot (a first for me!) flight from Milan...the city reveals itself through light rain...