Москва

Moscow does everything at superlative scale, and music first of all. The Bolshoi Theatre's quadriga has presided over Theatre Square since the tsars — the house where Swan Lake and Boris Godunov entered the world repertoire, its name simply meaning "big", which understates it — and the Moscow Conservatory's Great Hall, under Tchaikovsky's name and gaze, hosts the competition that has anointed pianists and violinists since Van Cliburn's legendary victory of 1958. The Tchaikovsky Concert Hall on Triumphal Square, the philharmonic's constructivist-rooted flagship, completes the triangle — Bolshoi and Tchaikovsky Hall both documented in the concert record, together with the Russian National Youth Symphony Orchestra, the young national ensemble founded to seed the country's orchestras.

The city around them is its own hyperbole: the Kremlin's cathedrals and armoury within red walls, St Basil's painted geometry on Red Square, the Seven Sisters' gothic skyscrapers ringing the horizon, and a metro whose chandeliers and mosaics make the commute a museum visit. Literary Moscow — Tolstoy's house, Bulgakov's flat, Chekhov's theatre with the seagull on the curtain — keeps the texts as present as the music. A city of bells by origin and of basses by temperament: Moscow's forty-times-forty churches became a hundred stages, all fortissimo.