Maruscha wrote -Надеюсь,другие матчи не вызовут у нее таких сильных чувств
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she told The Daily Telegraph. “We celebrated at the hotel afterwards with the players.”

?
Oleg Bloxin + Irina Derjugina
Miss Italy Pamela Camassa + poluzatschitnik Roma dlja sprawki http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOrfbraN ... re=related
Alina Somova + Mr.X from Zenit

Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden

Pyotr Williams’s decor, a fine new hero in Vladimir Shklyarov amd Alina Somova cannot lift the Mariinsky’s hammy ballet

David Dougill, August 9, 2009

In one sense — the range of repertory — the Mariinsky Ballet (formerly the Kirov) is taking no risks for its latest London season at Covent Garden. Three of its programmes are venerable productions of standard attractions — Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty — while the single triple bill celebrating Balanchine brings back Serenade, Rubies and Symphony in C, all of which the company has danced here on previous visits.

The Tchaikovsky, Petipa and Ivanov works have a timeless appeal, and display the purity in classical dancing that is one of the Mariinsky’s superlative qualities. Yet Romeo and Juliet, which opened this season last Monday, is stuck in time past, with production and dramatic approaches that look desperately old-fashioned. Leonid Lavrovsky’s staging and choreography date from 1940: a landmark creation of Soviet ballet in its day, but methods have moved on in the West. Anyone familiar with, say, Kenneth MacMillan’s definitive 1965 version for our own Royal Ballet, with its naturalistic style and psychological subtleties, must sit through Lavrovsky’s original with frequent disbelief that cannot willingly be suspended.

Visually, there is charm in Pyotr Williams’s decors: painted vistas of Italian landscape, great frescoes for the ballroom, impressive terraces and a lovely night-time setting for Juliet’s funeral (improbably alfresco), where the procession winds downhill. But the flats wobble (Lord Capulet nearly brought a doorway down) and scene transitions are clunky, filled in by tedious faffing in front of curtains. This is cumulatively dispiriting.

The hamminess of much of the acting is risible, with Vladimir Ponomarev’s Capulet head and shoulders above the rest — flailing arms, absurd poses, over-the-top gesturings straight out of a silent movie — and Ilya Kuznetsov, in parrot colours and a vermilion wig, flamboyantly coming a close second as Tybalt. The melodramatic thrashings of the Capulet couple over Tybalt’s corpse defy credulity. By contrast, Polina Rassadina made a warmly appealing, convincing character of the Nurse, untainted by the shenanigans around her.

Ensemble dances are done with gusto, and so are the sword fights. Alexander Sergeyev, with his nimble footwork and enthusiastic attack, is an effective Mercutio. Some soloists muffed steps, including a Jester (Andrei Ivanov) whose spinning-top display was let down by untidy finishes.

The Mariinsky offered a different cast of lovers for each of Romeo and Juliet’s four performances, leading off with the blonde, long-limbed Alina Somova, spoken of as the new star, who was a little too tall for perfect matching with her Romeo, Vladimir Shklyarov. Her dancing is fluent, strong and easy, and she plays the role conscientiously, though as yet not inspiring us with all the frissons of dramatic depth.

It is a defect of this production that Lavrovsky gave Romeo so little to do until the fourth scene (the ballroom). Both John Cranko’s and MacMillan’s versions establish the character much earlier on. Shklyarov is young-looking, fresh-faced, wistful — then, in the balcony pas de deux, he dazzles us with the speed and lightness of his solos, full of ardour, as well as being a secure partner, handling the big lifts with confidence. Good news.

It is in Lavrovsky’s love duets, sweeping, lyrical and passionate, that Somova and Shklyarov give us their best; I found them equally moving in the death scene. This production ends with the reconciliation, over their children’s bodies, of the two warring fathers, who put histrionics aside for gestures of simple eloquence in a memorable closing tableau. In the pit, the conductor Boris Gruzin led the Mariinsky Orchestra in a full-blooded account of Prokofiev’s music.

Mariinsky Ballet: Romeo and Juliet

Royal Opera House, London WC2

Geraldine Bedell, Sunday 9 August 2009

Romeo and Juliet calls for a degree of tenderness. Strip it out and you're left with a melodrama of mishaps and misunderstandings. Last week's production at Covent Garden seemed at times to have done just that, losing sight of the poetry and leaving the dancers struggling against a choreography and direction that emphasised drama and spectacle rather than love.

The Mariinsky Ballet, known as the Kirov in the Soviet era, is in Britain for two weeks with a blockbusting programme at the Royal Opera House that includes Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and works by Balanchine. For British audiences, it's a chance to see this remarkable company perform with its famed classical precision.

The season opened with Leonid Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet - not the Kenneth MacMillan version with which British audiences are familiar, but one that premiered in 1940. Nothing wrong with that - the 19th century ballets are still going strong - but this production, with its medieval-somewhere-in-Europe sets, felt old-fashioned, an impression some hammy acting did nothing to mitigate.

It wouldn't have surprised me if Tybalt (Ilya Kuznetsov) had swept on twirling moustaches, since he did everything else in the panto villain's handbook. He wasn't the only offender: Lord Capulet's shaking fists when Juliet refused to marry Paris were funny when he should have been outraged, hurt, confused, disappointed, a lot of things it ought to be possible to convey with a turn of the head, a movement of the arm. But time and again, Extreme Acting got in the way of the dancing.

What the production needed to offset this was a dazzling Romeo and Juliet. On opening night, Juliet was danced by the newcomer Alina Somova to mixed reviews. On Wednesday, I saw the vibrant Viktoria Tereshkina, whose dancing was technically brilliant, sensitive and expressive. I could happily have spent an evening watching the exquisite lines of her hands alone. The music seemed to flow through her so that she became not quite corporeal.

After she met Romeo (Evgeny Ivanchenko), she was full of joy but also distraction, as if she knew what was coming. Ivanchenko was a generous partner, his physical impressiveness counterpointed by a sense that he was bewildered by emotion. It was Tereshkina who most powerfully connected with the audience, but they were an engaging partnership.

This is not to deny that there were treats - the jesters, a playful and poignant Mercutio (Alexander Sergeyev) and plenty of fine dancing.

But the pleasures were too often obscured by emphasis on the big gesture. The prejudices of Verona seemed the least of anyone's troubles.

Romeo and Juliet, Royal Opera House, London

Reviewed by Clifford Bishop, Sunday, 9 August 2009

The granddaddy of all Romeo and Juliets shuffled into London last week, still spry even if it is eccentric and inclined to wander.

There's no need for a DNA test to demonstrate the paternity of Leonid Lavrovsky's production, first created for the Mariinsky Ballet (then the Kirov) in 1940. The family resemblances between this and most subsequent classical R&Js are obvious – from the faded green and gold colour schemes for the rival clans to the interminable death of Mercutio, strumming a farewell on his sword as if it were a mandolin.

When choreographer John Cranko was asked why he ripped off large swathes of Lavrovsky's ball scene while making his own Romeo and Juliet 20 years later, he replied: "It was too good not to use." Kenneth MacMillan was less forthright about his (arguably greater) version for the Royal Ballet, but just as filial.

Over the years, though, Lavrovsky's production has become a bit of a reprobate. There are nudges and winks and hints of perversity everywhere you look. Tybalt's cross-dressing companions delight in kicking a fruit vendor in the face. The ball where Romeo and Juliet meet, with its knights hawking around cushions for their ladies to kneel on, looks like a Cinquecento swingers' party.

There's no confrontation between Paris and Romeo at Juliet's tomb, because the former has wandered off with an arm around the shoulder of his consoling young page. And Lady Capulet's relationship with her young kinsman Tybalt is straight out of Aeschylus. At the end of the third act she rides his dead body, cowboy position, tearing her hair and pressing his hand to her breast and obviously having the time of her life.

Even before he becomes the focus of this deranged piece of auntie-love, Ilya Kuznetsov's Tybalt is the most unbalanced feature of the ballet. Manic, orange-haired, wild-eyed and clothed in garish motley, he is a Renaissance Joker with Verona as his Gotham City. Making him such a Lord of Misrule leaves the supposedly quicksilver Mercutio with nowhere to go, and Alexander Sergeyev, despite being a finer dancer and having flashier steps to dance, never comes close to suggesting that he has the personality to match his nemesis.

In all this there is the suspicion that Lavrovsky found Romeo and Juliet themselves a little boring. He hardly differentiates between Juliet's feelings for Romeo and Paris at the ball, and it takes a dancer of Viktoria Tereshkina's subtlety to imply that she's breathing just a bit more freely with the man she really loves. Her long, equine face settles too easily into dazed stoicism though, and she could do worse than learn from the woman who plays her nurse, the marvellously expressive Polina Rassadina.

As for Romeo, his one outstanding characteristic is that he is not at all outstanding – the only non-exhibitionist on display, upstaged even by two incidental beggars, lurking round the fringes. By this measure alone, Evgeny Ivanchenko was born to play him.

Swan Lake at Covent Garden

There are few sights as beautiful as this corps of swan maidens, each committed to a performance of shimmering harmony

Debra Craine. August 10, 2009

Put the Mariinsky in a white tutu ballet and something magical happens. Where Romeo and Juliet, which opened the Russians’ season at the Royal Opera House last week, came across as dramatically insincere, Swan Lake, which followed it, is a glittering showcase for the St Petersburg company’s elegance and classical refinement.

There are few sights as beautiful as this corps of swan maidens, each committed to a performance of shimmering harmony, as if one body is sharing a single breath, a single perfectly sculpted line. On opening night, the four Cygnets were no less immaculate, no less dazzling. Throughout, the entire cast seemed on message, eagerly inhabiting the conventions of a 19th-century fairytale ballet (admittedly in a mid-20th-century Soviet staging). The production’s visuals are a total pleasure, too, thanks to Igor Ivanov’s ravishing medieval German setting.

Each night there is a different Swan Lake cast; Friday’s was led by the Mariinsky’s grande dame, Uliana Lopatkina. She is a majestic Odette, her sorrow beyond sorrow, her long limbs quivering with the pain of her enslavement in Von Rothbart’s evil spell. She takes Ivanov’s famous Act II pas de deux at a crawl, casting her own kind of spell on the audience, hypnotic and transcendent. In Act IV, just before the shock of the Soviet happy ending, Lopatkina’s arms appear as broken as her heart. Her Odile is less mighty, and perhaps more aloof than she should be for a wicked temptress, but she drove through Petipa’s fouettés like a demon.

Daniil Korsuntsev cuts a dashing figure as Prince Siegfried and he’s an admirable partner to Lopatkina (no need to worry about those lifts when he’s around). But his own dancing isn’t quite strong enough and there were lapses when his attention seemed to wander beyond the limits of Siegfried’s general malaise. Ilya Kuznetsov proved a smooth villain as Von Rothbart, while a puckish Andrei Ivanov did exactly what was required of him as the Jester, delivering whizzing turns and unbridled exhibitionism. Boris Gruzin conducted Tchaikovsky’s iconic score slowly and with plenty of affection.

Swan Lake

Royal Opera House, London

Judith Mackrell. Sunday 9 August 2009 21.45 BST

The Mariinsky Ballet's Uliana Lopatkina is unique in her ability to make Odette, the enchanted heroine of Swan Lake, appear captive in a magical world. The exquisite tendrils of her dancing float in a space that seems eerily apart from the rest of the stage; the veiled mystery of her expression makes her interior life appear frozen, inaccessible.

Early in Lopatkina's career, this interpretation was so rarefied that it was in danger of disappearing into itself. More recently, though, she has begun to enlarge her reading of the role. Her dancing is no less delicately strange, but it has become much more expressively alert to Odette's music and her story. The slow yielding of Lopatkina's leg in plié seems to press on a deeply buried sensuality in Odette's character; the hesitant unfolding of a developpé registers hope struggling against fear.

As Odette's flashy nemesis, Odile, Lopatkina's dancing is equally responsive, the angle of her arabesque assuming a wicked, witty thrust as she rises to the glitter and cruelty of the role. Even her face has become more vivid. The first time Odette looks directly at Siegfried, it's as though love has forced open her eyes. While such overtly dramatic moments are few, Lopatkina makes them count to shocking effect.

Their impact would have been greater if her prince, Daniil Korsuntsev, had been up to his usual form. And the production as a whole is in need of an overhaul. This 60-year-old Swan Lake is a classic but its storytelling looks dated and dramatically threadbare.

In terms of pure dancing, however, the Mariinsky can still field an astonishing depth of talent. The corps are sublime, and among the soloists Yana Selina is outstanding – a dancer blessed with a rare spatial clarity (you can almost see the points of her internal compass) and a sweetness of line.

Swan Lake

Published Monday 10 August 2009 at 12:20 by Gavin Roebuck

Yet another Swan Lake, the most popular title for audiences. From the Mariinsky, this version by Sergeyev dates from 1950 and though perhaps tired, reassures with its familiarity and is made glorious by the joyous dancers. What would be really welcome is a new production of Swan Lake by Russian company.

In the challenging dual role of Odette/Odile, Uliana Lopatkina displays a superb technique - though, for one of the top ballerinas in the world, was disappointingly one-dimensional in her artistic interpretation on the first night. Daniil Korsuntsev as Prince Siegfried is more than a pleasing and secure partner. With powerful leaps and spins, he engages the audience with his bravura dancing and the acting of his love dilemma, which has a happy ending. The main pas de deux is danced with a flawless elegance unique to this company.

Andrei Ivanov as the jester amuses with his antics and astounds with multiple turns and sparkling leaps. Yana Selina, Valeria Martinyuk and Maxim Zuzin dance the Act I trio with a smooth grace. The famous dance for the four cygnets has been rehearsed to perfection. The soloist swans are unrivalled in grace and the well-schooled corps are a heavenly delight. The second act national dances are executed with an exhilarating effervescence. As the sorcerer von Rothbart, Ilya Kuznetsov is a suitably wicked force.

It is a tonic to hear a Russian orchestra at this venue, and with a heritage of more than 260 years and exceptional performances, a chance to see the Mariinsky is not to be missed.

Mariinsky Ballet: Swan Lake
By Sarah Frater, Evening Standard 10.08.09

After a disappointing Romeo and Juliet last week, the Mariinsky set all to rights with Swan Lake. The Tchaikovsky biggie is why we revere the St Petersburg troupe. It dances it with more seriousness and more finesse than anyone else, its corps of swans in perfect unison and its belief in the story complete.

Even very good ballet companies can be seen rather knocking off the steps but for the Mariinsky they are a kind of pilgrimage, and in the process are transformative for us.

Its belief is in the details. The corps is not just a line-up of pretty girls (though that they are) but also a hypnotising nimbus for Odette; the Tutor and Jester are not only roles for an older dancer and a whiz-bang young one but also reminders of the Prince’s conflict between high learning and high jinks, something he must reconcile; and Odette and Odile are not two fancy roles for a ballerina but two aspects of the feminine that must also be resolved.

This being the Mariinsky, we judge on much tighter standards than lesser troupes. No doubts about its corps of swan, nor the national dances in the Ballroom scene, nor the Act I pas de trois.

The Jester (Andrei Ivanov) was also excellent, his virtuoso moves and believable acting proving the role doesn’t have to be the panto it usually is. Also good was Ilya Kuznetsov as Von Rothbart. The evil magician is often portrayed as a creaky malcontent but with Kuznetsov he’s a sexy adventurer.

As Odette, Uliana Lopatkina was trance-like. Some pick at her quirky interpretation, and what could be a sharper Odile, but for me her tranquility is mesmerising. As her Prince, Daniil Korsuntsev was smooth dignity.

Swan Lake by the Mariinsky Ballet, Covent Garden

By Sarah Crompton
Published: 9:42AM BST 10 Aug 2009


Flight fantastic: the Mariinsky Swan Lake

At the age of 35, and with 14 years as a principal with the Mariinsky Ballet behind her, Uliana Lopatkina used her performance as Odette/Odile to give a masterclass in the art of ballet. She is 5ft 9in in her stockinged, sized-eight feet, far too tall to fit the traditional image of a ballerina. Yet every inch of her incredible, pliable body falls into the most perfect shapes; she not only shows you a supreme execution of every step, but the spaces around the steps, the placings and grace notes that make dance more than a technical display.

More than any other dancer I can think of, in the lovely way she carries her head, neck and arms – her épaulement – she reveals both the absolute rigour of her training, and an instinctive dignity and musicality that is all her own.

All of these qualities make her a lustrous interpreter of Petipa's most complex heroine – part-bird, part-princess as Odette in the lake scenes; part-witch in the ballroom when the wicked Odile takes her lookalike's place. She doesn't so much act the part as feel it, making each movement with her entire body, and creating an overwhelming, compelling intensity, whether in the tragic second act pas de deux when she first entrances Siegfried, or in the pyrotechnics of the third act, when Odile is showing off her power.

You realise just how outstanding she is when you watch Viktoria Tereshkina, one of the company's rising talents, in the same part the following night. Tereshkina is absolutely gorgeous, a filigree beauty whose movements extend through her fingertips, a firecracker when throwing off her fiendish fouettés. But, good though she is, she can't begin to match Lopatkina, a classical dancer in her prime.

However, partnered by Daniil Korsuntsev and Evgeny Ivanchenko respectively, they are the best things about a production that suffers from a 1950 staging by Konstantin Sergeyev that is fundamentally undramatic and bolts on a ridiculous happy ending.

This should have been jettisoned years ago; if the Mariinsky wants to pride itself on its traditional values then it should rid itself of this sort of interpolation because there is, as always, much to admire.

In the second act, the corps de ballet are as beautifully close to uniform as it is possible for a group of individuals to be; the groupings of the first act are pretty; the pas de trios and folk dances are impressively performed, particularly by Yana Selina; Andrei Ivanov gives his all over and over again in the stock role of the Jester.

But it is Lopatkina who makes this Swan Lake a marvel; without her it is surprisingly workaday.

Swan Lake, Royal Opera House, London

By Clement Crisp

Published: August 10 2009 22:47 | Last updated: August 10 2009 22:47

Why is the Mariinsky’s Swan Lake unrivalled as a view of this most popular, most traduced of ballets? It is not that its text is especially honourable; the Royal Ballet’s version is nearer the original. No, it is lineage – here is a Swan Lake from the stage that gave birth to it 114 years ago – and the fact that the tragedies and ideals of Russian history have imbued ballet, and this centrally Russian work of art, with a supra-theatrical identity that transcends its staging.

The Mariinsky’s Swan Lake is a palimpsest. Beneath its noble physical means are a century’s intense consideration about what classical ballet can mean and how best to show its aspirations, actual and spiritual. This may seem highfalutin, but ballet’s ardours, not least those defined by Agrippina Vaganova’s teachings in Russia, tell how it can become ritual – proposing an ideal through its insistence on the betterment of the human frame as expressive instrument.

So, the curtain rises (as it did on Friday night) on Petersburg’s Swan Lake, and we see courtiers moving with a kind of supernal ease through a waltz. A skein of swan-maidens arrive at a lakeside, and national dances are transformed into bravura displays of physical panache. We see everywhere a way of dancing that insists on harmony of means and, I suggest, of being. We saw on Friday a ballerina (Uliana Lopatkina) in whose interpretation of the Swan Princess, and her evil double, was the force of Mariinsky tradition, grandly understood, which gave the role dignity, inevitability. Her Odette is the incarnation of grief revealed in long, eloquent phrasing. Her Odile is hallucinatory – like Siegfried, we may sense that this is Odette still – and the dancing makes us believe without over-zealous bravura.

In all things this is a reading of commanding intelligence and grace. And thus I would describe the marvellous evolutions of the legion of swans, a corps de ballet as protean ballerina, and so, too, the national dances in the ballroom (the mazurka an unfailing marvel) and the soloists. Daniil Korsuntsev was a strong Siegfried for Lopatkina, Andrey Ivanov a brilliant Jester, and Mariinsky style, harmonious, aristocratic in all things, an inspiration. ★★★★★