The official programme of the IHI shareholders’ five-day trip to St Petersburg last month began with a welcome reception in the cavernous lobby of the Corinthia Hotel on Nevsky Prospekt and a folk show followed by dinner at the grand Nikolaevsky Palace, built in the 1850s for Grand Duke Nicholas, third son of Tsar Nicholas I.
A tour of the Hermitage can never do justice to the riches it contains
The palace, home to the city’s Trade Union Council since 1918, boasts a magnificent, almost breathtaking, double staircase and a grand ballroom where folk shows are held every night, with the hundreds of patrons being served dinner, in two sittings, in the various grand dining rooms.
I am not usually crazy about folk shows, but I enjoyed this one – Russian folk songs lustily sung by four men, singers doubling as dancers performing energetic Cossack-style movements, accompanied by a group of musicians playing balalaikas and other traditional instruments. It was also a feast for the eyes as there were frequent and elaborate costume changes, while we had some hilarious audience participation.
My wife Lilian and I couldn’t wait to visit the Hermitage Museum in the baroque Winter Palace, housing what is probably the world’s greatest art collection, although we had been there 12 years before. It is calculated that if one had to spend just two minutes gazing at each one of the museum’s three million items, one would need 11 years!
Thankfully, our efficient and very knowledgeable Russian guides, who all spoke excellent English, managed to show us some important highlights during our three-hour visit, as we moved through the opulent halls dripping in gold, with their intricately inlaid parquet flooring, enormous crystal chandeliers, huge urns made of malachite, jasper, lapis lazuli, and other semi-precious stones, precious porcelain items and rich Flemish tapestries hanging in the corridors.
The collection was started by the great Empress Catherine II, who in the 1790s bought hundreds of Old Masters (including nine Rembrandts, among them the intriguing Return of the Prodigal Son), Roman sculptures and architectural drawings, and commissioned several Wedgwood and Sevres dinner services, portraits and furniture.
The collection swelled after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when it acquired thousands of art works expropriated from the aristocracy and booty seized by the Red Army from Germany in World War II (the Germans had, in turn, looted it from territories they occupied).
Our guides led us to the impressive Impressionist collection of Renoirs, Van Goghs, Cézannes and works by Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Matisse (his Music and The Dance are outstanding), Picasso, and Gauguin. Then of course, came the Old Masters: Leonardo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Botticelli, Titian, the Spanish masters – Murillo, El Greco, Velazquez, Goya…
We took a few minutes to admire the enormous, massive solid silver sarcophagus of Prince Alexander Nevsky, a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church and the victor of the famous Battle of the Ice over the Teutonic Knights in 1240 (immortalised in Prokofiev’s cantata which served as the soundtrack for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film, Alexander Nevsky).
But even a well-conducted tour or two of the Hermitage can never do justice to the riches it contains: they are so numerous and diverse that several repeat visits are required to properly appreciate the collection, and many go to St Petersburg again and again for this reason alone.
Besides the Hermitage, there are at least 50 other museums in the city, including the Artillery Museum, with pieces dating from medieval to modern times (only about two per cent of its 1.8 million items are on show) and the Aurora Museum, built around the cruiser which played a historic role in the October revolution of 1917.
The day ended with a performance of Adam’s ballet Giselle at the world-famous Mariinsky Theatre (known as the Kirov in Soviet times), where the director and resident conductor is the celebrated Valery Gergiev. It was a superb performance, with Bolshoi star Evgenia Obraztsova in the title role and Mikhail Sinkevich conducting the orchestra.
More awe-striking splendour was in store for us with tours of Catherine Palace in Pushkin (Tsarskoe Selo) the next day and Peterhof the day after that.
The first is a sprawling palace, set in vast grounds, rivalling Versailles, a baroque masterpiece of the Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli, engaged by the Empress Elizabeth, who named the palace after her mother, Catherine I. Catherine II (the Great) in turn engaged the Scottish architect Charles Cameron to make a number of alterations.
Among the lavishly gilded interiors, the paintings, frescoed ceilings, crystal chandeliers, fine furniture, chinaware and sculptures, the pièce de résistance is undoubtedly the stupendous Amber Room, which makes a visit to the palace a must.
The Amber Room was originally commissioned by Frederick I of Prussia in 1701 for Königsberg Castle (destroyed in World War II), which was near the richest deposits of amber on the Baltic coast. Amber, the fossilised resin of prehistoric times, is a valued gemstone much used in jewellery.
However, Frederick’s successor in 1716 exchanged the solid amber panels for 50 giant guardsmen from Peter the Great. The panels languished in crates for decades until Empress Elizabeth decided to install them in the Catherine Palace under Rastrelli’s supervision, a task completed in 1770.
When the Germans occupied Tsarskoe Selo in 1941, Hitler ordered the Amber Room dismantled and returned to Königsberg Castle. It was again dismantled for safekeeping from British air raids.
The crates containing the panels were last seen in the castle’s courtyard in January 1945.
Shortly afterwards, a liner crammed with German refugees left Königsberg but was sunk by a Russian submarine. It is possible that the crates were on board. To this day the whereabouts of the original Amber Room remain a mystery.
The Amber Room in Catherine Palace was recreated, starting in 1982, by Russian craftsmen, partly financed by the German company Ruhrgas, and completed in 2003, when it was inaugurated jointly by President Putin and Chancellor Schroeder.
Much of the palace was rebuilt and restored after the widespread looting and destruction at the hands of the German army in 1941-1944. Indeed, in admiring the overwhelming opulence of the palace, one must also pay tribute to the masterly craftsmanship of the Russian restorers who patiently re-created the splendour of the original.
Peterhof, started by Peter the Great, is another sumptuous palace, the summer palace of the Tsars, built outside St Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland.
Its enormous grounds, with their waterways, ponds and fountains, are arguably as impressive as its interiors. Their outstanding feature is the Great Cascade, with its 142 jets of water spouting from gilded statues, bas-reliefs and other sources.
Inside the palace itself (again, mostly rebuilt after widespread destruction at the hands of the German army in 1944), the state rooms present a spectacle of gold, fine art and exquisite craftsmanship, including the ballroom, with its glittering chandeliers and crystal mirrors and the majestic Throne Room, the largest hall.
The IHI shareholders’ group also visited the Peter and Paul Fortress, including the cathedral, where the members of the Romanov dynasty, the last royal family to rule Russia, are buried. The cathedral’s golden spire is a landmark seen from kilometres around.
St Petersburg struck me as a livable city, clean, efficiently-run, if expensive, a vibrant metropolis with a mostly young population of five million.
With so much history, art, beauty and refinement oozing from so many of its sites in and around it, I think it definitely deserves more than one, or two, visits.
Concluded.