M.ART presents the London premiere of the musical performance From the Lives of Planets by Oleg Nesterov and the band Megapolis.
From the Lives of Planets is a creative exploration of an enigmatic period of Russian history, a period when everything seemed full of promise. Known as the “Thaw,” which took place between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s, it was a time of relaxed repression and censorship in culture and life in Russia. It was a sudden breath of freedom.
A new cinema was born — the Soviet “New Wave” — with one breakthrough followed by another. Russian films started gaining international recognition at the Cannes and Venice film festivals. But all of a sudden, freedom turned into repression putting an end to the golden age of Russian cinema. At the Mosfilm studio alone, twelve film projects were cancelled in the autumn of 1963. By the end of 1968, after the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring, the “New Wave” had become a sprawling graveyard of films that were never made.
From the Life of Planets is a musical tribute to those unfilmed motion pictures and to the era as a whole. Oleg Nesterov, the author of the project, explains: “We took four films that were never made and wrote music for them. More specifically, we wrote music in which you can envisage these films and imagine what they would have been like.”
Performers
Oleg Nesterov is a musician, producer, and writer. Oleg is the leader, guitarist and singer of the Moscow-based band Megapolis and the Kapella of Berlin Postmen project, as well as being the founder of Snegiri music label. He also teaches the producing music projects course at Moscow State University. His first book, “Skirt”, was published in 2008 – an alternative history book dedicated to the birth of rock’n’roll in pre-war Germany. 2014 saw the release of his multimedia project “Planet’s Life”, based on music used in 1960s films which have never been released. This musical project was later brought to life in the form of a double album, a large-scale online platform and a musical show. This highly awarded project was described as ‘one of the most important cultural events in recent years’, and received the national “Book of the Year” award in 2015. In June 2016, Oleg Nesterov presented to the public his second novel “Divine Stockholm”, the story of a city that 1960s Moscow strived to become – a capital with a perfect social order.
