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Press, Video & News about Mariinsky Ballet 
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Сообщение Mariinsky @ the Lincoln Center. July 2011

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    This Carmen Seeks Liberty in a Bullring, With Strokes of Fate

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    By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
    Published: July 17, 2011

    The most important feature of the Mariinsky Ballet’s season at the Metropolitan Opera House last week is what it didn’t contain. It’s 50 years since the company (then named Kirov) first danced in New York and the West. Hitherto its visits have featured a large proportion of the 19th-century ballet classics. Not so this time. Of its three recent programs in New York, two were of ballets created in the 21st century, while the third was a pair of ballets from 1947 and 1967.

    The reasons for this are musical. The artistic director of the Mariinsky opera and ballet company is the conductor Valery Gergiev, who made this New York week (part of the Lincoln Center Festival) a tribute to the composer Rodion Shchedrin. Although both ballets shown on Friday and Saturday evenings were to music by Georges Bizet, the first, “Carmen Suite,” came in Mr. Shchedrin’s 1967 arrangement. The program was designed for contrast: impure drama, then pure dance. But while the pure dance was substantial, the drama was merely flashy melodrama.

    Bizet’s Spanish heroine has been turned into dance many times. Carmen — like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Patrick Henry, and the lead characters of several plays by Schiller from “The Robbers” on — proclaims, effectively, “Give me liberty or give me death.” But she expresses her liberty (moral, social, political, amorous) in dance terms. In the first two acts of the opera, she presents herself in four pulsating dance tunes: the Habañera, Seguedilla, Chanson Bohème, and her own private dance with castanets for her new lover Don José.

    No choreographic version, however, has ever caught the brilliant subtleties of Carmen’s rhythms interestingly. And the ballet versions have tended to concentrate on nondance values (fate, death), often giving the story some bizarre or surreal emphasis, and usually making the title role a vehicle for a star ballerina more concerned with theatrical effects than sheer dancing.

    Mr. Shchedrin created his version of Bizet’s music, a striking combination of strings and percussion only, for the version choreographed by Alberto Alonso; Mr. Shchedrin also added dance numbers from two other Bizet dramatic scores, “L’Arlésienne” and “La Jolie Fille de Perth.” At its premiere the ballerina was Mr. Shchedrin’s wife, Maya Plisetskaya. Mr. Alonso, however, turned the dance impulse in Bizet’s music into something heavier and more clumsily expressionistic, reconceiving the story as happening in a bullring, with Carmen, José and the Torero flanked by a male Corregidor, and a female Fate figure clad in black like a particularly unhappy bull. The costumes, by Boris Messerer, are chic-surreal-modernist, with three female tobacco workers and a chorus of men all rendered faceless and wearing vertically divided attire (different colors on either side).

    Nothing about “Carmen Suite” is remotely subtle, though the narrative makes Carmen look considerably more dishonest about her change of erotic allegiance (from José to the Torero) than in the opera. The characters keep posing for us and one another; steps are hurled flamboyantly, like stunts. Early on it seems Carmen is the bullfighter aiming her darts at first one lover, then the next; but a final quartet — featuring her, José, the Torero and Fate — proceeds through a certain amount of partner changing until Carmen lies dead at José’s feet and Fate at the Torero’s. (It’s not often that you come away feeling Fate got a rough deal.)

    In Friday’s performance Diana Vishneva looked constantly gorgeous as Carmen, while Yuri Smekalov and Yevgeny Ivanchenko offered rival brands of machismo as José and the Torero. Carmen keeps extending one flashily straightened leg like a spear, and often then, to show how modern and bold she is, flexes a foot. All these characters, like Yulia Stepanova’s Fate, stay two -dimensional.

    Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” came as a relief, all the more so since, after years of being familiar fare at New York City Ballet, it has not been seen in New York for over two years. Any one phrase here has more brio than Mr. Alonso’s Carmen ever exhibits.

    Whereas City Ballet used to present “Symphony in C” with the women in all-white tutus and the men in black uniforms, at the Mariinsky it’s the men who wear mostly white, while the women’s tutus — especially those of the four lead ballerinas — are decorated with individual colors. The Mariinsky company, well equipped for the sheer elegance of the choreography, rises eagerly to the challenges of its speed, and off-balance stretch. And whereas City Ballet has often in recent years cast efficient blanks in roles that call for colorful ballerina performances, the Mariinsky dancers show how personality can shine through choreography that’s all steps.

    On Friday neither Alina Somova nor Ulyana Lopatkina were ideal in the long and demanding first and second movements. Both danced with clipped phrasing without the full sense of connecting impetus that can make these roles thrilling. But they both have unmistakable authority.

    Ms. Somova, who was full of youthfully acrobatic overemphasis when the company last visited New York in 2008, has gained refinement and glow: she could yet conquer the first movement. Ms. Lopatkina is the Mariinsky’s equivalent of City Ballet’s Wendy Whelan: an invariably intelligent, experienced and purposeful dancer whose style and physicality are seldom flattered by the most exposing high-classical repertory.

    Yevgenia Obraztsova and, in particular, Vladimir Shklyarov (his ebullient performances in the lead role of “The Little Humpbacked Horse” on Tuesday and Wednesday were the great events of this Mariinsky week) led the third movement exhilaratingly. Maria Shirinkina addressed the sudden-death high-velocity turns of the fourth movements deftly. The panache with which the company delivered the ensembles made one hope that this company, proud of its traditions but always revising its style, will return to New York soon for a longer season.



19 июл 2011, 05:12
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Сообщение Mariinsky @ the Lincoln Center. July 2011

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    A Book Critic at the Ballet

    July 14, 2011, 4:00 pm
    By DWIGHT GARNER

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    Yuri Smekalov as Count Vronsky and Ulyana Lopatkina as Anna Karenina in the
    Mariinsky Ballet’s production of “Anna Karenina.”


    A few years ago, The Guardian had the witty idea to ask its sports writers and cultural critics to swap jobs for a day. The results were delightful. An observation from the newspaper’s rugby columnist, Thomas Castalgnede, sent to review a production of “Tosca” at the Royal Opera House, has stuck with me. “What I saw in ‘Tosca’ was exactly what drew me to sport,” he wrote. “I just love to watch people give it everything — in any walk of life.”

    I’m a book critic, and not a complete idiot about dance. (I saw a Christopher Wheeldon ballet at the David H. Koch a few months ago that made me, and my 12-year-old daughter, weep with pleasure.) But about classical dance I am comprehensively uneducated. Asked by The Times to attend one of the first United States performances of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Anna Karenina,” by Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet — formerly known as the Kirov Ballet — I agreed, with nagging reservations. Brilliant works of interior art like Tolstoy’s novel tend to suffer terribly in the hands of those who would interpret them in other mediums. My colleague Alastair Macaulay’s mighty — ­and mightily entertaining — put-down of this production in Wednesday’s Times did not make me more eager to go.

    The Mariinsky’s production does, however, throw some complicating light on Tolstoy’s novel, and makes you turn it over freshly in your mind. The ballet, in its first half, gives off the air of a costume drama, of second-rate “Masterpiece Theater.” It’s stiff and proper and wan, filled with the pomp and broad gestures of early silent films. Tolstoy’s language can have a similarly chafing effect on readers coming to it for the first time; it takes time to synch with his rhythms.

    The first line of Tolstoy’s novel — it has become such a cliché (if not an outright emetic) that, when I was an editor at the Times Book Review,
    references to it in that publication were essentially banned –­ of course declares: “All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy
    after its own fashion.” All the memorable moments in the Mariinsky’s “Anna Karenina” dilate upon desolation and conjure a brewing sense of doom, a feeling underscored by the frequently beautiful set design (think snow, think lonely trains, think Edward Hopper by way of St. Petersburg).

    The ballet, for me, unfurled like a black rose in its second half. As Dan Savage would put it: It gets better. Two dances in particular — an icy one between Anna and her increasingly estranged husband, and one featuring the now-socially scorned Anna, the moral adultress, alone in a red dress — drilled me to my chair. Ulyana Lopatkina, who danced the role of Anna in the performance I saw, gave a sense of what Tolstoy called the character’s “wonderful depth of feeling.”

    Vladimir Nabokov was right when he called Tolstoy’s prose “so tiger bright, so original and universal that it easily transcends the sermon.” The
    Mariinsky Ballet’s “Anna Karenina” is definitely not, as Mr. Macaulay pointed out, something you would call tiger bright. But those trains,
    that snow, the flash of both Anna’s eyes and her red dress, these things I put in my readerly pocket like small valuable coins.



19 июл 2011, 05:24
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Сообщение Mariinsky @ the Lincoln Center. July 2011

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    Mariinsky Ballet loosens up in appealing NY run
    JOCELYN NOVECK, AP National Writer
    Published 03:28 p.m., Monday, July 18, 2011

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    "The Little Humpbacked Horse." Photo: Lincoln Center Festival, Natasha Razina / AP

    NEW YORK (AP) — Anytime you have both Sea Horses and Wet Nurses listed on a ballet program, you can pretty safely assume it's going to be more interesting than your basic "Swan Lake" or "Sleeping Beauty."

    But even that tantalizing hint of weirdness didn't prepare for the goofy, inspired fun of "The Little Humpbacked Horse," a romp through Russian folklore that was the clear highlight of the Mariinsky Ballet's weeklong appearance at the Lincoln Center Festival.

    Goofy? That's not an adjective one would generally use to describe the Mariinsky, better known to most of us by its former name, the Kirov Ballet. Grand, illustrious, legendary, sometimes mannered and stuffy — any of those would seem more like it.

    But bring a stable of some of the world's best trained dancers together with an inspired choreographer who likes to have fun along the way, and it can do wonders. And there's no question that the prodigiously talented Alexei Ratmansky, former artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, is the man of the moment in the ballet world.

    Not everything Ratmansky touches turns to gold — his "Anna Karenina" was also on display during the Mariinsky run at the Metropolitan Opera House that ended Saturday night. It was a pretty dull if well-intentioned affair, plagued by a mostly plodding score.

    But his 2009 "Humpbacked Horse" was a perfect vehicle to display some of the many facets of Ratmansky's talent — arresting, inventive choreography, a love for his subject, fondness for his dancers and an infectious embrace of silliness.

    He was aided immeasurably in this by the enthusiasm of his cast. A standout at Saturday's matinee was the lovely Alina Somova as the Tsar Maiden, a vision in white and gold with a long, blond braid. Somova's combination of charm, spunk, physical beauty and lush dancing was enough to make you understand why the buffoonish Tsar would jump into a cauldron of boiling water for her (don't ask, it's too complicated).

    Mocking the tsar isn't a problem these days, as it was during part of Russia's history — the only problem for non-Russian audiences, at least, may be understanding the convoluted plot (the program notes help — a bit). But all one really needs to know is that it concerns a young boy, Ivan the Fool, who manages to overcome various obstacles to win the Maiden's hand, aided by his trusted friend, the Humpbacked Horse.

    The score is by the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, whose music was being highlighted by the Mariinsky all week — the composer also penned the "Anna Karenina" score and arranged Bizet's music for "Carmen Suite," also performed here.

    But in "Humpbacked Horse," unlike in "Anna Karenina," the music, played by the Mariinsky orchestra and in some performances conducted by Mariinsky Theater director Valery Gergiev himself, is beautifully suited to the dancing, and full of verve and joy.

    Another huge plus: the bold, cheerfully odd costumes by Maxim Isayev. His funniest image may be those wacky Sea People (not to be confused with the Sea Horses) — both women and men in filmy green skirts, green makeup, fitted green caps, and with their own faces painted upside down on their chests, as if reflected in the water.

    As Ivan the Fool, who frankly didn't seem too foolish, Alexander Sergeyev was fresh-faced and charming in Saturday's cast (Vladimir Shklyarov won raves in the opening cast), and Grigory Popov was a buoyant Horse.

    But the charmer was Somova, just one of the Mariinsky's stellar ballerinas on display last week. Alas, the subdued affair that was "Anna Karenina," though it showcased the company's biggest stars — the glamorous Diana Vishneva and the supple Uliana Lopatkina — didn't allow a full appreciation of their appeal.

    A better vehicle for that was the only Balanchine work on the program, his wonderful "Symphony in C," with its four sections featuring four different couples.

    Here we got to see the precise and spirited Victoria Tereshkina, followed by the elegant Yekaterina Kondaurova, then the sprite and lively Yevgenia Obraztsova. And, finally, Maria Shrinkina, very young and gorgeous, looking like an early Vishneva in the making.

    The Mariinsky doesn't get to New York that often — their last appearance was at City Center in 2008, and that was after a six-year absence. Judging from the rapturous reception at the opera house last week, New Yorkers would like them back sooner next time.

    greenwichtime.com



19 июл 2011, 05:26
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Сообщение Mariinsky @ the Lincoln Center

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    The Little Humpbacked Horse Roundup
    by Emilia on July 21, 2011

    I arrived in New York last week just in time to catch the Mariinsky Ballet‘s last performance of The Little Humpbacked Horse, as well as an evening programme of Symphony in C paired with Alonso’s Carmen (but more on that later). The Little Humpbacked Horse combines a delightful (even hummable) score by Rodion Shchedrin with a captivating story, inventive steps and memorable characters. It was the first time Alexei Ratmansky‘s retake on this Russian folk classic was performed for US audiences and, after having also caught it in Paris last year, I was curious to see how the work would be received here.

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      Alina Somova as The Tsar Maiden and Vladimir Shklyarov as Ivan in Ratmansky's The Little Humpbacked Horse. Photo: Natasha Razina / Mariinsky Theatre ©

    On the matinée performance I attended Alina Somova (whom I had also previously seen in Paris) was enchanting as the Tsar Maiden. Her bendy body serves the choreography well, her long legs drawing elegant lines and soaring high for Ratmanky’s very challenging diagonal of hops en pointe. She also gets the balance between screwball and romance just right, reminding me of an all-time favorite kooky heroine: Barbara Streisand’s whimsical Judy Maxwell from What’s Up Doc? It’s love at first sight for The Tsar Maiden, who is amused by the goofy Ivan, yet immediately sees in him husband – and Tsar – material.

    As Ivan, first soloist Alexander Sergeyev was spot on casting: slender and bendy in physique, geeky and hugely likeable in temperament. He did not attempt to replicate Vladimir Shklyarov‘s signature sky-high Russian splits, but his technique was secure and his stylish grand pirouette with alternating arms went down very well with the crowds. It was interesting to see the enthusiasm of US audiences as they hardly ever waited for any variation to end before showing their appreciation.

    I was also happy to see a slightly different cast than last year with Islom Baimuradov (instead of Yuri Smekalov) as the perky villain (the Tsar’s Chamberlain), and corps de ballet member Anastasia Petushkova – charming but not quite as secure as Yekaterina “Big Red” Koundaurova – in the double role of the Mare/Sea Princess. Grigory Popov was, once again, the high-leaping, day-saving Humpbacked Horse. This is one of the most exciting and successful recent attempts at the s0-difficult-to-get-right genre of narrative ballet. Seeing it again made me a bit sad that we are not getting it in London as part of the Mariinsky’s 50th anniversary tour.

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    Alina Somova as The Tsar Maiden. Photo: Natasha Razina / Mariinsky Theatre ©

    READ MORE...



Последний раз редактировалось Octavia 26 июл 2011, 06:35, всего редактировалось 5 раз(а).



21 июл 2011, 22:32
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Сообщение Re: Press, Video & News about Mariinsky Ballet

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    Mariinsky Ballet, London

    Judith Mackrell
    Saturday 23 July 2011

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    Firebird by Mariinsky Ballet

    This giant St Petersburg company returns to London for a three-week season that includes some UK premieres , welcome repeats and a packed roster of stars. It opens with their signature work, Swan Lake (Mon to 8 Aug), and signature ballerina, Ulyana Lopatkina – allowing Mariinsky fans their essential dose of the company's fabled style and the wonder that is its corps de ballets. Later casts include Viktoria Tereshkina, Diana Vishneva and the fast-rising talent Alina Somova. Later this week is Homage To Fokine (Fri to 1 Aug) and a triple bill of Chopiniana (Les Sylphides), Scheherezade and Firebird, with Vishneva in the title role.

    Royal Opera House, WC2, Mon to 13 Aug



25 июл 2011, 19:30
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Сообщение Russian Unorthodox

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26 июл 2011, 05:45
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Сообщение Mariinsky London Tour. Jul-Aug, 2011

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    July 26, 2011 1:05 pm
    Swan Lake, Royal Opera House, London

    By Clement Crisp

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    The world’s stages are littered with productions of Swan Lake, the majority of which – as I know to my cost – are horrid and foolishly optimistic. One alone I find wholly engrossing, heart-touching, noble in its response to narrative as to Tchaikovsky’s score, and that is the version staged by the Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre, with which the company opened its London season on Monday.

    Its virtues are those of the troupe as a dance-ensemble: elegance of means, nobility of expression and that historical resonance that announces every step, every dramatic attitude, is the fruit of long years of thought, aspiration and reverence for the art, which this ballet celebrates. I treasure the Mariinsky’s scenery and costumes, which frame the piece so discreetly.

    I love the orchestral sound, eloquent from the Mariinsky musicians under Boris Gruzin’s baton. And I worship, the far side of idolatry, the corps de ballet: a legion of swans who move on a single, impeccable impulse, a protean ballerina; with soloists whose academic style is the fruit of ballet’s near three centuries in Petersburg; and national dancers who live vividly in their music – all nurtured by teaching and coaching of unrivalled wisdom.

    It seems I am writing more of a love-letter than the critical review of a performance dictated by my responsibilities to the readers of this newspaper. But I found in this Mariinsky performance an inevitability of means of expression, which defines the identity of Swan Lake and of the ballet troupe itself – and we must love the best when we see it.

    As Odette/Odile, Uliana Lopatkina proposed an interpretation radiant in understanding. Movement spoke with the music’s voice; long, serene phrases wrote the Swan Queen’s story, then revealed the smiling malevolence of von Rothbart’s creation, Odile, all in dancing of exquisite linear grace. At the heart of this magnificent staging, Lopatkina superbly existed. I salute the attentive Siegfried of Daniil Korsuntsev, and the elegant bravura of the first scene’s trio, with Maxim Zyuzin notably fine, not least for his impeccable feet.

    How fortunate we are to see this company. In a season marking the Golden Jubilee of its first visit to London, now – as then – we are in the presence of great Russian art.

    *****

    Royal Opera House

    WWW.FT.COM



27 июл 2011, 15:31
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Сообщение Mariinsky London Tour. Jul-Aug, 2011

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    Saturday, 30 July 2011 01:30

    Homage to Fokine, Mariinsky Ballet, Royal Opera House


    Written by Judith Flanders

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    The final tableau in The Firebird. Photo: V. Baranovsky

    Mikhail Fokine, choreographer to both west and east, looked forward and back, too. He studied in the old Imperial Theatre School when the Tsars ruled Russia, and he was also Diaghilev’s creative genius at the Ballets Russes, moving dance into the twentieth century before and after the Revolution. The Mariinsky, once his home, is a premier exponent of his multi-faceted styles.

    Chopiniana, his 1907 “white” ballet (known in the west as Les Sylphides) (right, photo V. Baranovsky), can be inert, shapeless, lifeless. Indeed, it all too frequently is. Saddled with an unappealing score (Chopin, orchestrated by Glazunov – no blame to Glazunov, it’s just that Chopin shouldn’t be messed with), the real difficulty is getting dancers to hold back, to do less, and then even less. George Balanchine, who emerged from the same Imperial School a generation after Fokine, famously once said to one of his dancers, “Dear, don’t do, just be.” Being is really difficult, and most dancers would rather do.

    'The corps made the piece, gently drifting in front of the music, the Romantic ideal of Fokine made flesh'

    More credit to the Mariinsky corps and soloists who danced last night, for every one of them was a be-er rather than do-er, holding back with elegant restraint, and letting the shape of the piece, and more importantly Fokine's groupings and tableaux, perform for them. All of the dances were just of soloist level, but all of them handled the material better than many more senior dancers can, or do. Maria Shirinkina, in particular, dancing the Mazurka, was exactly as Fokine must have imagined her. With a lovely jump, good musicality and rock-solid turns, she also let herself be wind-blown by the score, moving seemingly without volition wherever it wafted her.

    The corps, as so often with the Mariinsky, made the piece. With their beautiful heads and necks immaculately aligned, they ever so gently allowed their bourées to drift them in front of the music, the Romantic ideal of Fokine made flesh.

    With the Ballets Russes and Diaghilev’s second season in Paris, the company and Fokine produced an extravaganza of exoticism. First came a piece of Russian-ism, The Firebird, with Stravinsky’s then-exotically barbaric-sounding score, Léon Bakst extraordinary sets and Serge Golovin’s costumes. The Royal Ballet dances a later version, with sets by Natalia Goncharova, while this version, “reconstructed” by Isabelle Fokine, Fokine’s descendant, and the great Russian dancer Andris Liepa, uses the original Bakst and Golovin sketches, somewhat modified and adapted.

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    However authentic they may or may not be, they produce a wonderful stage picture, all greens and jades, blues and purples, half lush tropical forest, half almost underwater kingdom. (It is also immaculately lit by Vladimir Lukasevich.) Ekaterina Kondaurova created a sharp, spiky Firebird, while Tsar Ivan was the charming Andrei Ermakov, all open, blond idealism. Again, though, it is the tableaux, the shape of the large groups, here a gothically mysterious fairy-tale ensemble, that makes Fokine’s dance-world so individual.

    And from the same 1910 season, Schéhérazade leaves Russian exoticism and heads further east. Once more reconstructed by the Fokine/Liepa team, once more with adapted Bakst designs, this piece has always been more about theatre than about dance. Originally choreographed for Nijinksy, there is a heroic role for Igor Zelensky (above, photo N. Razina), who performs manfully, and Diana Vishneva, his adoring odalisque, who purrs felinely beside him. But apart from Zelensky’s show-stopper turns, the piece is primarily focused on the vivid, glittering décor, all jewel colours and bare midriffs. Bakst's oranges, purples, turquoises, his depiction of an elegantly savage harem, entranced Paris a century ago, and today it continues to charm, without perhaps ever being able to shock, or even surprise, as it once so obviously did.

    As with the company's first programme earlier in the week, this Fokine evening was notable for the immaculate playing of the Mariinsky orchestra, under Boris Gruzin. Hearing the Rimsky-Korsakov score so lushly played was more than equal to Bakst’s visual treat.

    THE ART DESK



01 авг 2011, 15:43
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Сообщение Mariinsky London Tour. Jul-Aug, 2011

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    August 1, 2011 6:01 pm

    Fokine Ballets, Royal Opera House, London

    By Clement Crisp

    Ballets, really successful ones, mutate due to audiences’ expectations of madder music, stronger wine. They can become parodies of themselves, and even Diaghilev wanted Matisse to redecorate Fokine’s Scheherazade, believing that the colours would have to be brighter for a 1920s audience, since nothing could recapture the excitement of the first blaze of Bakst’s designs a decade before, nor Ida Rubinstein’s glamour as Zobeide, and Nijinsky’s exoticism as the Golden Slave.

    All of which serves to introduce the Homage to Fokine programme that the Mariinsky Ballet showed us on Friday night. About Chopiniana (which is Les Sylphides under its original title) I have not a whisper of complaint. St Petersburg’s traditions have guarded this romantic reverie since its creation there in 1908, and the cast illuminates every moment. “Reaching for the moon”, as Fokine told Alicia Markova, they dance with the softest accents, the lightest gusts of feeling as of step.

    Yana Selina floated exquisitely in the arms of Alexander Parish (lately of the Royal Ballet and now an elegant Mariinsky danseur). Maria Shirinkina ravishingly coasted on the air in the Mazurka, and Xenia Ostreikovskaya danced the Prelude on an ecstatic phrase. Perfection.

    About the succeeding Firebird and Scheherazade, my opening sentence is comment enough. Both were made by Fokine for the Ballets Russes in those first dazzling seasons. Their success, their allure, and a whiff of Arabian Nights naughtiness guaranteed them tremendous box-office appeal. They survived after Diaghilev as spectres of their former selves, and today, frankly, they are almost unrecognisable. Their performance style is long lost. I saw late Diaghilev artists and immediately post-Diaghilev Ballets Russes performers trying to knock artistic sense into them, without denting their unlikeliness. What the Mariinsky troupe offers is also unlikely, but redeemed (up to a point) by the grand gifts of their casts and by tremendous performance from the Mariinsky orchestra under Boris Gruzin.

    I was bowled over by the huge shapes carved in the air by Ekaterina Kondaurova as the Firebird (“I want the beat of mighty wings”, said Fokine – and there they were), and intrigued by Igor Zelensky’s wholly modern sexual charge as the Golden Slave. But these elaborate revivals are van Meegeren rather than Vermeer, and nothing can disguise their gaudy improbability.

    FT.com



03 авг 2011, 02:47
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Сообщение Mariinsky London Tour. Jul-Aug, 2011

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    Don Quixote, Mariinsky Ballet, Royal Opera House


    Written by Judith Flanders

    It is all too easy to be cynical about the ballet version of Don Quixote. With almost no part for the title character, it is a 19th-century Russian take on faux-Spanish dancing, a farce in which the barber Basilio longs for the charming Kitri, while her father wants her to marry a rich fop. As the Radio Times used to say, “Much hilarity ensues.”
    Well, actually, it rarely does, for funny ballets are few and far between. Frederick Ashton achieved it in his miraculous La fille mal gardée; Jerome Robbins’s The Concert can make a grown (wo)man weep with happiness on the right night; Baryshnikov even managed to make his 1978 Don Q for American Ballet Theater a delightful romp. (This is the one the Royal Ballet revived in the 1990s.) But it’s a tough one. The music, by Ludwig Minkus, is of the oompah variety. The lead dancers need steely skill, precision comic timing, and bags of charm – not a small ask.

    'It's easy to imagine Henry Irving or Beerbohm Tree sashaying out in something similar to these costumes'

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    The Mariinsky’s version is preserved in aspic, being the 1900 recreation of Petipa's original 1869 piece, done by the ballet master Alexander Gorsky. In its own way, this is fascinating. We are back, not in the Soviet era that their Swan Lake recalls, but in the 19th-century days of epic scenery painters. It is entirely possible, when looking at the great painted backdrop of a harbour with its splendid flags and careful perspective, or at the corps’s costumes, a curious melange of cod-Elizabethan slashed doublets with Spanish add-ons, to imagine Henry Irving or Beerbohm Tree sashaying out in something similar (pictured right, Henry Ainslie as Faust in a very similar male costume). For those historically inclined, it is an interesting immersion in a period most of us in the West have never experienced.

    If this historical excursus makes it sound like I’m tiptoeing around the central question – did the lead dancers have, as I outlined, “steely skill, precision comic timing, and bags of charm”? – well, I am a bit. The performances were taken by a husband-and-wife team, Denis and Anastasia Matvienko. Denis (I will first-name them, for simplicity’s sake) has, unusually for Russia, freelanced for some years, before becoming a principal at the Mariinsky a couple of years ago. He has an unforced charm of personality that carries well; his turns can be spectacular; and he is an equally spectacular partner, solid and reassuring to his partner and the audience alike. Anastasia is still a soloist, and she was not yet comfortable with this fiendish part. But more importantly than technique, one never received the sense that for her dancing has any higher purpose than its gymnastic components.

    Both Matvienkos were eclipsed in Act I by the stellar Ekaterina Kondaurova (who had dazzled everyone as the Firebird last week) and the young soloist Alexander Sergeev (who will appear later this week in Balanchine's Scotch Symphony - hurry and get your tickets now!). Sergeev has that nameless thing that Anastasia so far lacks, the ability to shape a phrase, to surprise the viewer each time, even as a step is repeated. Kondaurova and Sergeev were worth the price of admission alone, and the audience knew it, roaring its approval despite their relatively circumscribed parts.

    Изображение

    The Mariinsky’s commitment to character dancing, too, should be commended. Too often in the West, the character dances are a time when audiences begin to try and remember if they need to stop and buy yoghurt on the way home, and was Johnny’s football kit put through the wash. The Russian companies have always given them full due, and, in particular, Islom Baimuradow as the Gypsy King, and Kamil Iangurazov, dancing a fandango in the last act, deserved the acclaim they received – they gave truly wholehearted performances.

    It is rare, I think, to come out of Don Q thinking that everything was perfect - it's just not that kind of ballet. It is a curate’s egg, but with a yolk of gold. That the Mariinsky have not entirely managed to unscramble it is no shame. Few companies ever have.

    theartsdesk.com


04 авг 2011, 23:00
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