Nargiz
With most theaters on tour or closed for the month, a lot of Moscow’s entertainment has migrated outdoors. On Saturday night the Green Theater at VDNKh Park is welcoming Nargiz, a singer from Uzbekistan with a spectacular voice and modern folkloric style. Born to a musical family in Tashkent, Nargiz won many singing awards as a child and young adult. After many years in the U.S. where she put out an album and paid her dues in restaurant singing, she moved to Russia where her career took off. The show begins at 7 p.m. on Saturday; tickets are available here.
‘Ave Maria’ in St. Peter and Paul’s Cathedral
On Sunday evening at 7 p.m. the Lutheran cathedral of St. Peter and Paul is hosting one of its many marvelous concerts. This is an evening of “Ave Maria” — different variations of “Ave Maria" composed by Franz Shubert, Gabriel Faure, Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, Johan Sebastian Bach and many others — performed by soprano Yelena Zolotova and organist Anna Yukova, who have several dozen Russian and international awards between them. If you have never attended a concert at the cathedral, you are in for a delightful surprise. The church in an old section of central Moscow was built just before the 1917 Revolution and served a congregation of almost 20,000 Germans, Estonians, Lithuanians and Finns. After the Revolution the clergy was arrested, objects of value confiscated, and the church eventually handed over to the Diafilm studio, which gutted the interior and worked there for nearly a century. After the congregation was given back the church in the 1990s, they restored as much of the interior as possible and installed the magnificent organ that had been in the first Lutheran church in the city. Today many musical performances are performed in the church, which is renowned for its acoustics and serene atmosphere. The performance is approximately 90 minutes. More information and tickets may be found here.
See impressionists while you can
Last week we suggested you see a marvelous show of woman painters at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts’ Gallery of European and American Art of the 19th and 20th Centuries. This week we say: run back and spent a long afternoon on the second and third floors. The museum has announced that next Monday they will start packing up their main collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art to ship to the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris for an enormous show entitled “The Morozov Collections: Icons of Modernism.” That means that there will be no works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gaugin, Henri Matisse or Pablo Picasso on display until February 2022. Of course, you could always fly to Paris. In the meantime, tickets and information here.
For (bored) kids
August is a difficult month for children if you’re in the city. Most of their friends are at the dacha or on vacation. Sunny weather and the park have lost their allure. Theaters are closed. The mall is a bore. On cranky days there is one solution: Go to Experimentanium. This enormous scientific playground has different halls for kids to experiment with, on, around and sometimes in water, mechanical devices, acoustics, optics, electricity and electromagnetism. Almost everything is hands on, and kids from toddlers to pre-teens will find something fascinating and enjoyable. Open weekdays and weekends. For more information and tickets, see the site here.
Night at the movies
Although the theaters are still filled with oldies but goodies, a few summer blockbusters are hitting the screens. This week “Suicide Squad” has arrived in Moscow, allowing us all to enjoy watching brilliant actors play supernatural villains fighting to the death for world dominance. Or something like that. You can see it at Pioner or several other theaters around town. If you feel like scaring yourself silly, you can watch “Old.” If you want a vacation, you can have fun on a “Jungle Cruise” with your kids. If you feel in the mood for something quirky, you can see “Gerry” with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck at the Garage outdoor theater on Sunday at 9 pm. But if you want to see a real cinema event, buy a ticket for the Leos Carax musical “Annette” with Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. It premieres on Wednesday at Formula Kino Yevropa.
