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The changing balance of power and wealth between the aristocracy and the monarchy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century has fundamentally influenced today’s national cultural landscape of art and architecture.
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932) was more a personal than a political drama. All was well for the first two years after the opera’s première in 1934, but shortly after Stalin went to a performance, it was vigorously condemned in the state press.
This lecture questions this view and shows how, from the sixteenth century, aristocratic families deployed their collections and commissioned their buildings in both town and country in order to further their political and dynastic ambitions.
Musicians make sounds - that much, you’d have thought, is obvious! Yet more than the sounds they make, it’s the choices that musicians are making about how and when to play that really matter - choices that are made through listening.
An integral part of the tumultuous political events of the century was the cultural ambition of the principal players who form the subject of this lecture.