Georgia (Georgian Republic)

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares119 Views

    Why Levan Akin Won’t Show His New Movie ‘Crossing’ in Georgia

    by

    The director Levan Akin is worried that his latest film, “Crossing,” will inflame tensions around L.G.B.T. visibility in the post-Soviet nation.When Levan Akin’s movie “And Then We Danced,” a romance between men in a Georgian folk-dance troupe, premiered at Cannes in 2019, it became a festival hit and later an Oscars submission. But when it screened in Georgia later that year, the movie’s combination of traditional Georgian culture and gay love sparked violent protests from conservative groups.Akin’s latest film, “Crossing,” which opens in U.S. theaters Friday, also deals with L.G.B.T. themes, though the filmmaker said recently that he had hoped its reception in Georgia would be smoother. Its plot, about a woman who travels from Georgia to Turkey to search for her estranged trans niece, seemed unlikely be perceived as an attack Georgian culture in the same way, he said.But this spring, when Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, erupted in weeks of protests against a law on foreign influence that critics said would hamper Georgia’s chances of joining the European Union, Akin decided against releasing the movie there in such a polarized climate.“There is such political turmoil,” Akin said, “and we don’t want the film to be used as fodder in the debate. I don’t want that to repeat.”In “Crossing,” Lia (Mzia Arabuli), a retired and unmarried history teacher, travels to Istanbul from the city of Batumi, on Georgia’s Black Sea coast, searching for her niece Tekla, who has fled after her family rejected her. Lia is assisted in scouring the city’s narrow streets and packed rooming houses by Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans rights activist and lawyer. They form an unlikely bond — but finding Tekla proves difficult.Lucas Kankava as Achi, and Mzia Arabuli at Lia in “Crossing.”via MUBIWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      An Orchestra Brings Harmony to a Region of Discord

      by

      The Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra unites players from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine with a message of peace and dialogue.In February, Grigory Ambartsumyan, a 22-year-old Ukrainian violinist of Armenian descent, awoke in Kyiv to the sound of bombs. It was the beginning of Russia’s assault on his country, and the coming days and weeks were a blur of restless nights in bomb shelters.Now, six months later and with war still raging, Ambartsumyan and dozens of his fellow musicians with the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra have reunited in Tsinandali, a bucolic village in Georgia for the fourth annual Tsinandali Festival of classical music. It’s been a difficult three years since the orchestra debuted in September 2019, given the coronavirus pandemic (which stopped it from performing at the festival for two years), as well as continuing tensions between Georgia’s neighbors Azerbaijan and Armenia, and, of course, the lingering war in nearby Ukraine.This year, there is an urgent sense of camaraderie and hope among these young musicians and the festival organizers in this historically volatile region. Some 80 performers from seven countries from the Caucasus region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and a few neighboring nations — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine — will play three of the 19 concerts at the festival, which runs Sept. 2-11.Members of the orchestra celebrate after their Mahler performance in 2019.Tsinandali Festival“If we don’t establish a new relationship across borders with music, we are going to lose the opportunity to plant some seeds in the hearts of these young musicians,” said the Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the Tsinandali Festival. “You have to start with the young people to solve problems through connections rather than divisions.”The orchestra opens this year’s festival on Friday with “Adagio” by the Ukrainian modern composer Bohdana Frolyak (along with pieces by Brahms and Beethoven). The concert will be conducted by Oksana Lyniv, also Ukrainian, who in 2021 became the first woman to conduct at the Bayreuth Festival.The Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra is the brainchild of Martin Engstroem, the director of the well-heeled Verbier Festival in Switzerland. In 2018 he was hired, along with Avi Shoshani, the secretary general of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, by the private-equity investor George Ramishvili, a Georgian, to start a music festival in his home country. The festival began in September 2019 on an estate northeast of the capital of Tbilisi once owned by the 19th-century Romantic poet Prince Alexander Chavchavadze.But Engstroem and Shoshani didn’t just want to put on another summer festival for the elite. “I felt one needed to create a festival in this part of the world with a message,” Engstroem said, something “humanitarian and geopolitical.”The Tsinandali Festival is held on the grounds of an estate northeast of Tbilisi once owned by the 19th-century Romantic poet Prince Alexander Chavchavadze.Tsinandali FestivalLike many classical music festivals, the festival celebrates the works of major European composers — but it also includes music from the Caucasus, as well as Turkey and other countries that border the region, where tensions stretch back hundreds of years, including between Turkey and Armenia and, more recently, Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as Russia and Georgia.The State of the WarA New Counteroffensive: Ukraine has long vowed a major push in the southern region of Kherson to retake territory seized by Russia. It may have begun.Nuclear Plant Standoff: After renewed shelling intensified fears about a nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia power plant, United Nations inspectors arrived in Ukraine for a high-stakes visit to the Russian-controlled station.Russia’s Military Expansion: President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, a sign that he expects a prolonged war — an outcome Ukraine has incentive to avoid.Unusual Approaches: Ukrainian troops, facing strained supply lines, are turning to jury-rigged weapons and equipment bartering among units.“Georgia and this region of Tsinandali are right in the center of where countries have been fighting forever,” Engstroem said.“Now, more than, ever, a dialogue is so important. We have seen that classical music is a universal language,” he added. “It’s relatively easy for kids from different backgrounds to create a common language through music.”For Ambartsumyan, the violinist, this year’s festival seems like a miracle. After enduring the bombardment of Kyiv earlier in the year, he remained in the city to study at the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music this summer before traveling to Tsinandali for rehearsals. Speaking through a translator in a video interview, Ambartsumyan fought back tears as he talked about his journey in the last six months and recalled several friends killed in the war.“Starting in February, the explosions woke me up at night, and people were running and hiding everywhere,” he said. “It was such a tough time. And these past two years have been hard because I’m both Armenian and Ukrainian.”He was referring to the simmering clash between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. It’s a conflict that much of the world seems to not know much — or care much — about, he said.“In 2019 I met an Azerbaijan girl in the youth orchestra, and I remember her saying that we can communicate together, all of us, despite the tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan,” he said. “It’s important for me and other musicians to realize that peace is the most important thing in life.”War has also touched other members of the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra.“We were a little bit scared when the festival started in 2019 because there is always something going on or that could explode at any time,” said Diana Sargsyan, 23, an Armenian violinist. “And then Armenia and Azerbaijan fought for 44 days in 2020. I had brothers in the war, and I was always thinking about them.”The Tsinandali Festival continued in 2020 and 2021 but on a smaller scale and without the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra.Tsinandali FestivalAlthough the orchestra didn’t reunite in 2020 and 2021 (the Tsinandali Festival continued, but on a much smaller scale), many of the young musicians stayed in touch and hoped they would play this year.“People might wonder how we can sit next to each other, but it’s OK for us,” Sargsyan added. “The language we speak is music. It doesn’t matter which country you come from. We are all the same.”It’s a sentiment echoed by Ekaterine Tsenteradze, 25, a Georgian oboist who remembers the brief war between her country and Russia as a child.“I was 12 in 2008, and I remember seeing Russian soldiers in the streets,” Tsenteradze said, referring to the occupation of Georgia by Russian forces in August 2008 before a cease-fire was brokered after 12 days. “I have this fear again now. It feels like another country could be next. We’re in peace now and playing music, but it could all change.”Ambartsumyan said he found a certain pleasure that the orchestra would play works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, two composers who were repressed by the Soviet regime, for the festival’s closing performance on Sept. 11.The conductor Derrick Inouye, the ensemble’s assistant conductor, working with the orchestra this month in rehearsal.Tsinandali Festival“It will be emotional for me because in their music there is a small grain of tragedy, but also underlying a lot of their music is a satire of the government,” he said. Ambartsumyan said it was an ironic bit of programming in 2022, given that music written to criticize the Russian government is being played decades later in a region where Russian aggression is once again in the headlines.“When I saw Prokofiev and Shostakovich on the program, I thought to myself, ‘perfect!’” he said. “I know a little something about what these two composers went through.” More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Alexander Toradze, Idiosyncratic Pianist, Dies at 69

      by

      A defector to the U.S., he was admired for his prowess in the Russian repertory, but his individualistic approach “was not for everyone — or for all repertoire.”Alexander Toradze, a Georgian American pianist and Soviet defector whose idiosyncratic and bravura performances of Russian composers were either loved or hated, died on May 11 at his home in South Bend, Ind. He was 69.The cause was heart failure, his health having been deteriorating since 2019, his manager, Ettore F. Volontieri, said.Mr. Toradze was also stricken with heart failure, as it was later diagnosed, on April 23 during a performance with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Washington State. Though he had to be helped onstage at the start because of weakness, he completed the concert and was hospitalized afterward, Mr. Volontieri said.Mr. Toradze specialized in Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and other Russian composers. His concerts this spring were to include a performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Illinois Philharmonic, scheduled for May 14.Mr. Toradze, whom friends and colleagues called Lexo, won the silver medal at the 1977 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, though members of the jury were divided, with some finding his playing disturbingly percussive.The critic Peter G. Davis, however, was among his fans: He wrote in The New York Times two years later that “his playing had the best sort of éclat and brilliance in that it stemmed directly from the character of the music rather than from a desire to show off.”“His tone,” he added, “was glittering but never clattery; the poise and precision of his interpretation had elegance as well as tremendous visceral excitement.”In a 1984 review, Donal Henahan of The Times wrote of Mr. Toradze’s playing, “It is the distinctive Russian style of an older generation, still alive in this era of stamped-out international virtuosos.”Mr. Toradze defected to the United States in 1983, presenting himself at the American Embassy in Madrid for asylum during a tour with the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra. According to the critic and author Joseph Horowitz, a close friend and artistic adviser to Mr. Toradze, it was a dramatic defection that involved highway chases in Spain and an attempted kidnapping by the K.G.B. in a restaurant.Mr. Toradze in 2001. His idiosyncratic performances tended to divide critics, with some loving his style and others finding it disturbing.Chris Lee for The New York TimesThree months later, Mr. Toradze embarked on an American tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. During his career he performed with major U.S. orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, as well as the Berlin Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, among others.In 1991, he was appointed to a newly endowed professorship in piano at Indiana University South Bend, where he created the Toradze Piano Studio, inspired by the intense, all-encompassing training of Soviet music schools. His studio consisted of former and current students, who presented mostly Russian repertory in marathon concerts in the United States and Europe.His students also played soccer, and the Toradze Studio team won the university championship three years in a row. “Soccer is not very good for the hands,” Mr. Toradze told The Times in 2002, “but it’s great for the brain.”A gregarious host, he enjoyed giving late-night dinners and boisterous parties for his students, many of whom he recruited from Russia and Georgia. He retired from the university in 2017.While he was widely admired, Mr. Toradze’s individualistic approach “was not for everyone — or for all repertoire,” Mr. Horowitz wrote in an appreciation published after Mr. Toradze’s death. “Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto was one piece that could not survive a Lexo onslaught.”The Times critic Bernard Holland, reviewing a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1988, wrote that Mr. Toradze’s “customary extravagance would have ill fit this music’s classical restraint, so his tactic was to seek the other extreme.” The results, he said, “alternated between the weird and the inaudible.”Mr. Toradze acknowledged such responses. “I always anticipate outraged attacks,” he said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun in 1992.Alexander Davidovich Toradze was born on May 30, 1952, in Tbilisi, Georgia, to the composer David Toradze and the actress Liana Asatiani. He attended the Special Music School for Gifted Children in Tbilisi and the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1978.While he was a student in Moscow, Mr. Toradze listened to illicit broadcasts of the Voice of America program “Jazz Hour.” To him, he said, jazz represented artistic freedom. When performing in Portland, Ore., during a Soviet-sponsored tour in 1978, he learned that Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson were to perform twice the next day. Much to the irritation of his manager, he decided to skip a rehearsal in Miami to attend the concerts. Ms. Fitzgerald invited him onstage, where he told her that she was a “goddess for people in the Soviet Union.”Mr. Toradze’s small catalog of recordings includes a 1998 disc of Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, with Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra, and Shostakovich piano concertos, with Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.Mr. Toradze, a practicing Orthodox Christian, advised young artists to get in the habit of praying before performances. Speaking about Liszt’s variations on a theme of Bach, he told The Times in 1986: “Bach’s cantata describes worrying, complaining, doubting and crying. Many of these feelings were part of my life. But the piece moves steadily and heavily toward a fantastic final chorale in major, with the words, ‘What God does is well done.’ That is my credo.”His marriage to the pianist Susan Blake ended in divorce in 2002. He is survived by his sons, David and Alex; a sister, Nino Toradze; and his longtime partner, the pianist Siwon Kim.After defecting to the United States, Mr. Toradze lamented the imposition of strict union rules regarding rehearsal times that could prevent an orchestra from practicing to the end of a concerto, even if the musicians were just a few bars short. But he appreciated the high-quality instruments on offer.“In Russia, I would play many times on pianos with broken strings or broken keys,” he told the radio host Bruce Duffie in 2002.But, he added, “there are times when the piano is not well, or you are not well, but you go on anyway.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Rezo Gabriadze, Who Created Magic Out of Puppetry, Dies at 84

      by

      His productions, vivid and fanciful, played all over the world, including at Lincoln Center.Rezo Gabriadze, a playwright, screenwriter and director whose fanciful avant-garde stage works, many using puppets, were presented at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York and numerous other outlets as well as at the theater named for him in his home country, Georgia, died on Sunday in its capital, Tbilisi. He was 84.The Rezo Gabriadze Theater in Tbilisi confirmed his death. The cause was not given.Mr. Gabriadze was known for unconventional works that challenged the audience’s imagination. In his play “Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient,” for instance, which was staged at Lincoln Center in 2004 and toured the United States, Mikhail Baryshnikov, branching out into acting, portrayed a man who thought he was a car.More often, though, Mr. Gabriadze’s stage works were populated not by human performers but by puppets. Perhaps his best-known creation was “The Battle of Stalingrad,” a puppet play first staged in Dijon, France, in 1996. It examined that pivotal World War II battle, but obliquely, through individual stories. Some involved human characters, but there was also a love story between two horses, as well as an ant with a dying daughter.“Writ terribly small, with the delicacy of lacework,” Bruce Weber wrote in The New York Times, reviewing a production at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2000, “‘The Battle of Stalingrad’ compels the audience to unusual concentration, lest the artistry be disturbed. And artistry it is, beautiful, poignant and lingering.”Perhaps Mr. Gabriadze’s best-known creation was “The Battle of Stalingrad,” a puppet play seen here at The Kennedy Center in 2000. It examined the pivotal World War II battle, but obliquely, through individual stories.Mario del Curto/’The Battle of Stalingrad’Another scene from “The Battle of Stalingrad.” It “compels the audience to unusual concentration, lest the artistry be disturbed,” wrote a Times critic. “And artistry it is, beautiful, poignant and lingering.”Vladimir Meltser“The Autumn of My Springtime,” first seen in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2002, was a story about a bird that drew heavily on Mr. Gabriadze’s memories of his childhood. “Ramona,” seen at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2015, was a love story between two trains.These and other works were full of striking stage pictures and cleverly made, adroitly maneuvered puppets designed by Mr. Gabriadze and his expert team.“As characters either powerful or weak,” Mr. Weber wrote, “his puppets, long faced, with a clattery-boned droopiness, seemingly constructed from bird legs and seashell fragments held together with string, share a frailty that feels, well, human.”Mr. Gabriadze, who early in his career was a sculptor and then a screenwriter and film director, was most at home among his puppets.“The puppet theater is the ideal place for me because you can draw, sculpt and truly create your characters,” he told The Post & Courier of Charleston, S.C., in 2017, when he brought his two-trains-in-love story to the Spoleto Festival USA in that city. “This is the maximum of freedom you can achieve in art. I make and do everything in my theater myself. I write the plays, choose the music — I am completely free in my decision-making.”Revaz Gabriadze was born on June 29, 1936, in Kutaisi, in what was then Soviet Georgia. In a 2002 interview with The Times, he recalled having his imagination opened up after World War II when American movies began making their way to Georgia.“Our generation was ‘Tarzan-ized,’” he said. “Tarzan, feminine women, men in tuxedos; this was the first time we saw these things, and it was one part of our spiritual nourishment.”He was artistically inclined.“In my father’s family, the men worked stone,” he told Le Monde in 2003. “They built churches or bridges. There are many delicate and ancient bridges in Georgia. Maybe that’s where my first vocation came from, sculpture.”Those skills would prove useful when he began carving and constructing puppets. But other careers came first.After working for a time as a journalist, he gravitated to filmmaking, writing dozens of screenplays and directing a few movies. “I was making tragicomic films,” he said. “I was always watched by the authorities, and I lacked diplomacy.”Georgia was still under Soviet control, and it was the era of Socialist Realism in film and other genres. Realism, Mr. Gabriadze said, just wasn’t his thing.“I can understand the human urge to put things in order,” he told The Times. “But you can’t divide life between fiction and fact. ‘Tom Sawyer’ may be a novel, but it is also an encyclopedia of childhood.”In Mr. Gabriadze’s play “Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient,” which was staged at Lincoln Center in 2004 and toured the United States, Mikhail Baryshnikov, center, branched out into acting, portraying a man who thought he was a car.Michal DanielHe opened his puppet theater in 1981. (In 2010 it unveiled a newly renovated space designed by Mr. Gabriadze and featuring a deliberately crooked clock tower.)In the early 1990s, with Georgia embroiled in civil war, Mr. Gabriadze relocated to Moscow for several years, working at the Obraztsov State Puppet Theater, where he began to create “The Battle of Stalingrad.” The piece, he said, was in part a response to the civil war. But, like many of his works, it also drew on memories from his childhood.“I was 6 years old during the Battle of Stalingrad,” he said. “I remember the word echoing through childhood.”While taking his puppet productions all over the world, Mr. Gabriadze continued to pursue his love of art. In 2012 the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow mounted an exhibition devoted to his paintings, graphic works and sculpture.Full information on his survivors was not available. A son, Levan, produced some of his shows and, in 2018, made a film about his father’s life called simply, “Rezo.”In an interview with the travel blog Intrepid Feet First, Levan talked about his father and his work.“The thing about Rezo is that he lives in his own bubble,” he said. “We all do. But Rezo brings you into his.” More