Something extraordinary will hit London's cultural life tomorrow, and it's arisen without the a... The arts column: why we owe

As readers of last Saturday's Arts + Books may be aware, we are being treated to a 10-day festival - a feast, indeed - of Russian opera, given by Russia's two greatest companies.

At Covent Garden, the Moscow-based Bolshoi presents Prokofiev's Fiery Angel and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov; over at the Coliseum, its rival the St Petersburg Mariinsky (formerly known by its communist name, the Kirov) celebrates Shostakovich's centenary with The Nose, Moscow, Cheryomushki and Katerina Izmailova. Both companies are also presenting ballet - classics and novelties from the Bolshoi, and works inspired by Shostakovich from the Mariinsky.

The simultaneity of the Bolshoi and Mariinsky visits didn't come about by chance: the Mariinsky was negotiating a Covent Garden season with the impresario Victor Hochhauser, but, when agreement on repertory couldn't be reached, Hochhauser booked the more obliging Bolshoi instead.

What is bizarre, however, is the purely coincidental bonus: at the same time, without their managers having any foreknowledge, Opera Holland Park just happens to have programmed Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, while the Linbury Studio revives The Opera Group's production of The Nose and Glyndebourne presents Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery, with a Russian conductor and cast.

This remarkable impromptu festival has its roots in the two summers before the First World War. In 1913 and 1914, the great Sergei Diaghilev joined forces with the conductor and impresario Thomas Beecham, who had just walked out of Covent Garden in a huff. Together they hired Drury Lane to introduce Russian opera to audiences almost totally unaware of its existence.

Diaghilev is now so closely associated with ballet that it's often forgotten that opera was his first love, and that he did much to introduce Russian opera to the West. Until 1913, works by Glinka and Tchaikovsky had received the odd British hearing, but Diaghilev was the first to showcase the genre coherently.

To London he brought the Mariinsky, presenting the British premières of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Ivan the Terrible. At first, Beecham's memoirs record that "the house was empty", but very soon, word got round and everything sold out.

Beecham drily observed that a "pleasing vein of incomprehensibility" contributed to the éclat, "hardly anyone in the audience knowing a word of the language or having the slightest idea what was taking place on the stage".

But it wasn't just snobbery that did the trick: the style of Russian opera was radically different from anything Gounod, Wagner or Verdi had offered. As well as the gorgeous richness of the orchestral palette, the sheer nationalistic grandeur of Mussorgsky's conceptions was overwhelming.

Nor had London ever heard the unique splendour of a Russian chorus, which played a far more prominent role than it ever did in the more familiar French, German or Italian repertories.

Then there was the bass Fyodor Chaliapin, making his London debut. Aside from his magnificent singing, Chaliapin's presence radiated an intensity beyond vulgar melodrama that struck terror into its mesmerised beholders.

Two years earlier, Nijinsky had stunned London with his animal sexuality: now this big-hearted, wild-tempered peasant presented another aspect of the Russian soul, and today he remains a byword for histrionic grandeur, ranking with Caruso and Callas among opera's 20th-century legends.

These triumphs were enlarged the following summer, when Diaghilev brought the company back to Drury Lane with new work by the young Stravinsky (Le Rossignol, as well as Nijinsky's ballet of Le Sacre du printemps, which London audiences considered mere gibberish), three more operas by Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin's Prince Igor.

The latter - with its grand pageantry and brilliant Polovtsian ballet interlude, as well as Chaliapin playing two contrasting roles - caused the biggest sensation. Beecham recalled that, though he had witnessed "a goodly number of stirring episodes in the theatre", he could think of none to match "the tumult among the audience" that followed the epic scene in Act 3, set in the Tartar camp.

Then came the war and a revolution. The Russian advance was halted, and not until Khrushchev's thaw allowed the Bolshoi Ballet to visit Covent Garden in 1956 would London be again exposed to the full impact of Slavic culture.

Today, of course, the traffic runs freely - Russian orchestras and theatre groups, as well as its opera and ballet companies, are annually welcomed and comfortably accommodated.

This summer's operatic banquet will surely be wondrous, but it cannot deliver the rarest and most valuable of cultural experiences, offered by Diaghilev - the shock of the new.

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