Larisa Kaftan
The Prime Minister discussed the topic with Andrew Lloyd Webber, the author of Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats and other cult musicals.
Legendary British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the author of Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Evita, among the world's most popular musicals, visited Mr Putin at Novo-Ogaryovo, his country residence outside Moscow.
Baron Lloyd Webber is working with BBC experts to choose the British Eurovision contestant and intends to write a song for the occasion. He says it is the greatest challenge of his life-but he has never dodged hard jobs.
He regrets that his country has not won the Eurovision Song Contest for several years, and is baffled by Britain's setbacks. He went to Moscow in search of the answer, a reasonable choice given that Russia's Dima Bilan won last year's contest, giving Russia hosting rights for the 2009 event.
He asked question everywhere, even at the highest level, the prime ministerial. He wondered if Russians would vote for a British singer, to which Mr Putin replied with a smile that he would surely do so if he found the Brit to be the best of all. As the conversation revealed, Mr Putin was well-versed in Eurovision rules.
He said, in particular: "Eurovision has an essential rule-audiences cannot vote for their compatriots. That's reasonable."
He discerns a political undercurrent to what might seem to be merely a glib youth show: "Think what you like of the genre-but 150 million young people all over Europe watch the contest, Russians being no exception. The vast audience feels included in a huge community, making the contest a prominent factor in Europe's future."
The talk did not concern the Eurovision contest alone. Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber told Mr Putin about the impact Russian music had made on him. Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich are his favourite composers. His first recording, of pieces from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker and Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges, was made when he was a child of six. (Our paper knows more-he once said in a Komsomolskaya Pravda interview that his cats, of Russian lineage, were named Sergei and Dmitry, after Prokofiev and Shostakovich.)
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Mr Putin talked about their countries' national cultures-what brought them together and what was unique in each. Mr Putin told his guest that he was familiar with his musicals and saw Cats in Hamburg in the early 1990s.