Oleg y las raras artes

A portrait of the excentric Russian composer Oleg Karavaychuk. “The 88-year-old is first seen in an opulent corridor of the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, decked out in his trademark maroon beret. A small, stick-thin, sharp-featured, baggy-jumpered figure of indeterminate gender, Oleg advances towards the tripod-fixed camera delivering a trilling rumination in Russian on the state of things (’people have lost their soul’). Many would be quite happy to listen to Karavaychuk’s erudite, bygone idiosyncrasies for hours. But in further episodes he gets to show off his virtuoso and disconcertingly experimental piano skills. Director Andrés Duque – who’s plainly besotted with his bizarrely charismatic protagonist – allows him plentiful time to expound his philosophies of consonance and dissonance, also referring wistfully to ‘the wisdom of the Great Leader’ Stalin and evidently has no difficulty in being simultaneously stalinist and snobbishly imperialist/royalist. Karavaychuk: ‘My melodies are uncomfortable but they’re brilliant.’” (Neil Young)

In the presence of Andrés Duque.