I caught the closing spectacle of the Sochi Winter Olympics, which had gone off without any troubling interludes from potential terrorist attacks or embarrassing Pussy Riot human rights moments. With the Putin sock-puppet removed in Ukraine just as the games were ending, though, I couldn’t help wondering what thoughts were running through their team’s minds as they counted down the time to their make good on their transport home.
Ever since the jaw-dropping show at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, there has been a rising standard of expectations in the special effects department, and the closing ceremony was fairly effective (though nowhere near so funky as the London opening show two years ago). The theme of Russian accomplishments in the arts was exemplified by music, painting, ballet and writing, sparking some curious ironies en route.
The show opened with a seascape of glistening humans behaving as schools of fish as a boat floated over head bearing some children who had stepped through a magic mirror in the video intro to the live sequence. But as a classical and film music buff I practically fell off my couch to hear the music: the powerful score to the 1956 American movie “Giant,” which meant they were hijacking the work of Russian-born but very American émigré Dimitri Tiomkin. The incongruity of the greatness of James Dean, Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson’s mythic cattle and oil derrick Texas arising in my head was just the first rush of surrealism.
Next there was a nifty suspended inverted town floating over a Chagall painting, which made me sympathetic for the “blood rushing to the brain” endurance of the performers (presumably circus acrobats) hanging from the pavement for the duration of the segment. Quite striking visually, though it only reminded me that Chagall was yet another émigré from Soviet Russia.
The ode to Russian ballet played out beneath a gigantic chandelier as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade thrummed, not a composer primarily known for ballet compared to Tchaikovsky or the later Stravinsky (yet another Parisian émigré) or Prokofiev (who did ricochet back to Russia from Paris and died on the same day as Stalin)—but those latter two may have been deemed a mite too musically adventurous a hundred years on for an audience more used to Hans Zimmer film scores than even Tiomkin.
There was some discrete (if again ironic) gumption for the homage to Russia’s writers when the once banned and exiled Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s portrait showed up along with the more expected Russian icons of Tolstoy and Chekhov—I couldn’t tell if also banned Boris Pasternak or current Tea Party darling Ayn Rand appeared too. And given the proclivity for stomping on media critics in Putin’s Wonderland (Edward Snowden excepted, as he has a temporary Hall Pass on this one), one wonders whether the designers of the segment were biting there collective tongues until it was safely executed (without them being too, as they might have been back when Joe Stalin was doodling wolves on his desk blotter and metastasizing gulags).
I was fearing poor closeted gay Tchaikovsky might have been overlooked entirely, but his First Piano Concerto (the more famous one of his three) made an appearance during the closing fireworks display—funny how hard it is to do fireworks without deploying him. By this time the games’ theme critters (Bear, Hare and Leopard) were on hand in giant cuddly animatronic form to skate around a hall of colossal mirrors and blow out the Olympic flame along with casting a wistful eye back to the 1980 Moscow games, when Soviets were still Red, people were fretting that the US-USSR nuclear competition was about to blow up the world, and the Iran Hostage crisis flummoxed Americans were boycotting the show due to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
Ah, those were the days!
