The Azerbaijan Grand Prix has packed up and left the Caspian shoreline. In just over four weeks, the same streets will fill again, this time for the Baku International Arts Festival.
On Saturday afternoon, the loudest noise in Baku was twenty cars braking from around 350km/h into Turn 1 at the end of the city’s long shoreline straight. By Monday, much of that noise had gone.
It happens quickly here. The Baku City Circuit takes weeks to build, yet the teardown runs to a carefully planned sequence. Wire fencing is rolled up along the kerbs, the temporary footbridge at Turn 1 comes down, and the metal sheeting that protected shopfronts along the circuit is pulled away. Within 24 to 48 hours, most of the city is open to traffic again. The grandstands and the heaviest concrete barriers stay a little longer. Sometimes the red-and-white paint on the kerbs is the last sign that a Formula 1 car was ever here.
And it was quite a weekend to clear away. Great Britain’s George Russell of Mercedes took victory in the tenth Formula 1 race held in Baku, on a 6km circuit that asks more of a driver than almost any other on the calendar. The 51 laps pair one of the sport’s fastest straights with the tight run past the medieval walls of the Old City, where one misjudged inch ends a race.
This year the race was also held on a Saturday rather than a Sunday. F1 agreed to the change so the race would not fall on Azerbaijan’s Remembrance Day, 27 September, which marks the start of the Second Karabakh War in 2020. It was a rare calendar reshuffle, and a reminder that the Grand Prix belongs to the city, not the other way around.
So what fills a street circuit once the cars have gone?
In Baku’s case, it is a second major event. From 28 October to 8 November, the city hosts the second Baku International Arts Festival (BIAF). The festival’s programme includes more than 20 events of theatre, ballet, music, film and masterclasses. It brings in performers from the UK, Israel, Canada, Monaco, Russia, the United States and France, as well as from Azerbaijan.
The line-up is strong. English National Ballet makes its first appearance in Baku with Masters in Motion: Forsythe / Pite on 6 and 7 November. Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, also making its Baku debut, performs Jean-Christophe Maillot’s LAC, a contemporary retelling of Swan Lake, on 7 November. Violinist David Garrett brings his Millennium Symphony to the Heydar Aliyev Center on 4 November. Maxim Vengerov, a two-time Grammy winner, is also on the bill, and Akram Khan presents his new work Thikra: Night of Remembering.
Theatre audiences will see Lev Dodin’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull on 29 and 30 October, and Dmitry Krymov’s Bloody Mary for Tel Aviv’s Gesher Theatre on 1 and 2 November followed by The Rezo Gabriadze Marionette Theatre’s Alfred and Violetta which occupies the multifunctional space of the Heydar Aliyev Center on 3 and 4 November. The festival is anchored by the 120th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich, a composer with close ties to Azerbaijan, most strikingly through William Kentridge’s multimedia interpretation of the Symphony No. 10.
For those who came for the Grand Prix, the geography will feel familiar. Icherisheher is a festival venue, as are the Muslim Magomayev State Philharmonic Hall just outside the Old City walls, the National Drama Theatre and the Heydar Aliyev Palace. The streets where fans lined the fences a week ago will soon carry audiences to their seats.
The fast cars will not return until next September, but F1 fans have been enticed to come back for the ballet, which is something out of the ordinary. But Baku is no ordinary city.
The Old City gate that the drivers squeezed through at full commitment will still be there at the end of October, this time as the way into a very different kind of performance and no less exhilarating, but with a slight change of pace.
Tickets and the full programme are available at biaf.az.