Swan Lake, Royal Opera House, London

By Zoë Anderson

Wednesday, 12 August 2009

The Mariinsky Ballet's Swan Lake is sleek, but short on dramatic bite. The Swan Queen is frosty, the courtiers distant. Though the production is handsome, this performance feels leisurely until the corps de ballet of swans come on. At last, excitement rises: they move with taut energy, sweeping into their patterns.

This St Petersburg company still uses the Soviet-era production by Konstantin Sergeyev. This gives the hero and heroine a happy ending, but also saddles the court with a hyperactive jester.

Uliana Lopatkina, who danced the Swan Queen on opening night, is the Mariinsky's reigning ballerina. Tall, long-limbed and imperious, she can also be extremely mannered. Here, she's dancing with a welcome new simplicity. Poses are less exaggerated, less twisty at wrist and shoulder. Her legs unfold cleanly, with clear momentum. She takes her dances at a slow pace, but the orchestra is in no danger of grinding to a halt.

Lopatkina remains a chilly enchanted princess, not much interested in Daniil Korsuntsev's Prince. When she returns as the heroine's wicked double, she's brisker, with sharper accents, but still remote. Korsuntsev partners smoothly, but he's most ardent when describing his beloved in her absence.

The court acts are full of spectacle, of national dances and big corps numbers. This evening was polished, efficient rather than thrilling. Boris Gruzin conducts a brisk, tidy performance from the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre. Tchaikovsky's score can sound so much more powerful than this.

Everything looks up with the first entrance of the swans. The corps move with a scale that makes the stage look bigger. They fly into their lines and groupings, quick and bold. Legs and feet are beautifully stretched, darting through the steps. Upper bodies are grandly expansive. They're particularly fine in the second act, with its massed lines and blocks of swans. Though the last-act storm scene could be wilder, the swans keep their rigour.

Soloist dancing is confident. The big swans move with bold assurance, though the cygnets look tense. The first-act pas de trois is smoothly danced. Yana Selina, the first soloist, has strong feet and lively phrasing. Maxim Zuzin is buoyant, though Valeria Martynyuk's phrasing is choppy. As the far-too-prominent Jester, Andrei Ivanov milks every jump and spin.

Mariinsky display classic perfection with sex
By Sarah Frater, Evening Standard 13.08.09

Sexy, even elegant sexy, is not something you associate with the Mariinsky. The imperious troupe epitomises classical perfection to which we chastely defer but while its restraint and dignity ennoble us, they hardly quicken the pulse.

However, they looked sexy last night, and just so good in their Balanchine triple bill that you half wished they’d stop the Swan Lakes and Sleeping Beauties and dance only the Russian-born choreographer’s work. It’s as if Balanchine’s plotless ballets let the dancers be themselves, which is not swans and swains, but fit 20-somethings with energy and flair.

Vladimir Shklyarov was all this in Rubies, the middle work from Balanchine’s full-length Jewels that’s often performed in mixed bills. With floppy hair and easy manners, he’s the twinkle in the eye of Stravinsky’s music (Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra), although Irina Golub and Ekaterina Kondaurova hardly slouched. I should mention these two are only soloists, and the four men in the corps of even humbler rank, yet all had a panache you’d be pushed to find in more senior European dancers.

When you think about it, the Russian visitors should be brilliant at Balanchine. Having trained at the pre‑Revolutionary Mariinsky, his classicism is their classicism, plus they have his seriousness which, in a ballet such as Serenade (to Tchaikovsky) translates into an almost unbearable poignancy. Viktoria Tereshkina was extraordinarily moving as the lead woman, somehow conveying in this plotless ballet a story of sacrifice and longing.

Tereshkina flipped to dazzling allure as the lead woman in the first movement of Symphony in C. Set to Bizet’s music of the same name, it provided the Mariinsky with yet more scope to show off its fabulous dancers, of whom no one need have any doubt.

The Mariinsky Ballet's Homage to Balanchine at Covent Garden

By Mark Monahan. Published: 8:22PM BST 13 Aug 2009

My personal disappointment over the first night of the Mariinsky’s Homage to Balanchine triple bill was their wilful decision to keep Alina Somova for evening two of Symphony in C. The much-vaunted, but also much-criticised new Mariinsky star was a hopeless Juilet earlier in their run – all flash and no feeling. And I’d been very curious to see if Balanchine’s grand but more emotionally neutral steps might allow her a spectacular atonement.

In the event, it was Uliana Lopatkina, the St Petersburg troupe’s grande dame, who stole the attention during this show-us-what-you’re-made-of piece for four partnered ballerinas. In her face, her carriage, the use of her long frame, there was a grave stateliness – a sense of performing as if to the manner born – that perfectly suited Balanchine’s treatment of the Bizet score. And particularly, quietly dazzling were those moments when, falling into partner Daniil Korsuntsev’s left, then right arm, she returned to standing straight with such measured grace that they might have been in zero gravity.

Of the other three leads, Viktoria Tereshkina best caught Balanchine’s grand style, but the less senior Elena Evseeva and Evgenia Obratzova neverthless danced prettily and with no little zest, if without the final degree of star quality that this piece demands. Still, it was a commanding performance overall, thanks in large part, too, to the corps, who were magnificently disciplined throughout the entire evening.

Their strength and uniformity were swiftly apparent in Serenade, the enigmatic, early-Balanchine piece that opened the bill, and both leads – Tereshkina and especially her partner Evgeny Ivanchenko – impressed. Yet overall, if Serenade glowed (and the Tchaikovsky was luxuriantly played), it was nevertheless slightly short on the elusive, ethereal, ungraspable quality that it requires. For all their bravura, were the corps perhaps just a little lacking in delicacy? They were ravishing, yet a little too much of this world.

The highlight was Rubies, Balanchine’s Stravinsky-set, Broadway-infused homage to his adoptive Manhattan, taken from his gemstone-inspired triptych Jewels. Not that it was perfect: the set was garishly awful (how one craved Jean-Marc Puissant’s for the Royal Ballet), there was the odd slip from young Vladimir Shklyarov, and he and the rather cheesily-grinning Irina Golub lacked a certain telepathy as partners.

But still, what sexy, electrifying dancing from both of them – and, yet more so, from Ekaterina Kondaurova as the lofty ice-maiden who appears to vie for his affection. She repeatedly bent her perfect line (that back! that neck!) into the most fantastically provocative shapes, and moved with the speed of a performer half her height.

The corps were razor-sharp, and the whole thing felt like a spin through Times Square, in an open-top E-Type, on a steamy summer’s night – which is just as it should be.

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Mariinsky Ballet at Covent Garden

Three iconic ballets by the Russian-born American choreographer George Balanchine are performed with mixed success

Debra Craine

The Mariinsky Ballet started its love affair with George Balanchine in the 1990s and, like many love affairs, it has gone through its ups and downs. Our first sighting of the Russians dancing Balanchine was exhilarating, as if they were making up for lost time. Now it feels as if their relationship with the Russian-born American choreographer has slightly cooled. On opening night, at least, the three iconic ballets on display had mixed success.

Serenade (1934) was Balanchine’s first American ballet and drew heavily on Romantic traditions while announcing the beginnings of something completely new. The Mariinsky dancers, not surprisingly, respond better to the former, especially the corps de ballet, who seem to embody the very concept of feminine grace. Viktoria Tereshkina, though, is the odd woman out; her strident approach to the lead female role was offputting. A shame, too, that the dancers’ pointe shoes are so noisy. It spoils the poetic illusion so wonderfully conjured by Balanchine and Tchaikovsky.

Rubies (1967), the centrepiece of the Homage to Balanchine triple bill, is the choreographer at his most playful and jazzy. Set to Stravinsky’s impish score, it should be a lot of fun, but here it felt more like a duty than a pleasure, especially the ropey duet proferred by Irina Golub and Vladimir Shklyarov, who might as well have been rehearsing it. Happily, Ekaterina Kondaurova was on hand to light a fire under the performance with her commanding, infectious and deliciously kinky dancing, a ringmaster marshalling her circus ponies for our entertainment.

Symphony in C, set to Bizet’s first symphony, is guaranteed to close any evening on a high. Created for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1947, it’s a work of supreme classical elegance and buoyancy, and it suits the Russians rather well (though it is odd to see the costumes colour-coded). Tereshkina was a lot happier here leading the first movement, which suits her head- girl temperament better, while a stunning Uliana Lopatkina took control of the second with majestic and dreamy dancing that was perfumed with unattainable glamour (credit too to Daniil Korsuntsev’s exemplary partnering). Elena Evseeva was flirtatious in the third and Evgenia Obraztsova charming in the fourth, while the final whirlwind of tutus had the audience practically jumping for joy.

Tonight the programme changes yet again (the Mariinsky is nothing if not hard-working). The final performances of the season are of The Sleeping Beauty.

The Mariinsky’s Balanchine, Royal Opera House, London

By Clement Crisp

Published: August 13 2009 22:50 | Last updated: August 13 2009 22:50



George Balanchine loved America, devoted 50 years to making classic ballet – as he had learned it in St Petersburg – an American art, and the history of New York City Ballet tells us so. But when the Mariinsky Ballet, his nursery, dances Balanchine, as the troupe marvellously did in a triple bill on Wednesday night, we know that the grain of what he produced was ever Russian. (The two poles of Balanchine’s life in America were Tchaikovsky’s Serenade, his first creation in the US, and the finale of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony, made just before illness claimed him in 1981.) The Mariinsky dancers understand Balanchine, and find in his choreography ideas to which they respond with blissful skill.

Serenade, opening this programme, showed movement fully explored, from the moment when Viktoria Tereshkina first appears, vivid as a flame racing through tinder, to the last elegiac moments as she is carried off stage. The richness of Mariinsky pulse and phrasing in movement, the luscious sweep of the company’s dancing, are ideally placed on the score: we become wholly involved in the choreography’s dramas, the fascinations of its structure. (And admire the women’s skirts, fuller, better, than in any other staging I know.)

How bright-cut the succeeding Rubies, so smart and streetwise in this account led by Irina Golub, Vladimir Shklyarov and Ekaterina Kondaurova. And so witty. I love Golub’s impeccable legs and feet, her bright-eyed insouciance, and her ability (like Shklyarov) to dance off-beat, off-centre, and right at the heart of the choreography. I hugely admire Shklyarov’s dynamic bravura, his happy way of dealing with every trick Balanchine threw at the danseur, and I love Kondaurova as the second ballerina, quick-witted, alert to every danced idea.

The closing Symphony in C is a familiar triumph with the Mariinsky, but no less breathtaking for that. (Its costumes by Irina Press are ideal, an added joy.) Each movement brings its delights: Tereshkina’s rhythmic verve and clarity; Uliana Lopatkina producing marvels of serenest long-breathed legato, phrasing like an unhurried angel; Elena Evseyeva an enchantment in the third movement, admirably partnered by the elegant Filipp Stepin; Evegenia Obraztsova, a diamond sparkling through the presto. And the men, frankly, the best there are. The company offers dancing of effortless dignity, sunlit grace. Here’s riches! ★★★

Homage to Balanchine

Published Friday 14 August 2009 at 12:30 by Gavin Roebuck

Serenade, the first ballet Balanchine created in America, is a neo-classical work saturated in romanticism.

The dancers although glorious, are a tad restrained so the company seems to have lost some of its elegant magic in this work from previous showings. Ekaterina Kondaurova with Daniil Korsuntsev and Yulianna Chereshkevich are a delight with speedy joyous fluid movements.

With expressive richness, Rubies from Jewels is full of Stravinsky’s jazzy modernism suggestive of an energetic, sharp, showbusiness style. Although Denis Matvienko and Irina Golub shine, the work seems to lack the real spiky, speedy edge we get from the Royal Ballet - it is too tame. Ludmila Sveshnikova thrillingly plays the piano solo.

The four movement Symphony in C by Bizet is based on the music rather than any narrative. It is full of exquisitely configured choreography. With a sense of line a touch more elegant than any other company, the dancers, who now are accustomed to the fast velocity of Balanchine without loosing any poise, end the programme on a high. Alina Somova, Ekaterina Kondaurova and Evgenia Obraztsova are more sparkling than the interval champagne. It is also a treat to have Pavel Bubelnikov conduct the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre.

The Mariinsky: Homage to Balanchine

Royal Opera House, London

Judith Mackrell. Friday 14 August 2009

Balanchine may have reinvented ballet for 20th-century America, but he never lost touch with his own classical Russian past. Every ballet he made, he admitted, was a return to Petipa, and that's the reason why the Mariinsky, when they finally began to dance Balanchine in the late 1980s, found it such a good fit. The racing speeds and sheering angles of his aesthetic were new to the St Petersburg dancers, but they understood, as no others could, its underlying logic.

In this current triple bill, the corps dance, if anything, with a greater style and panache. The first minutes in Serenade, in which they formally open out their bodies to the beauty and passion of classicism, were as moving a ritual as I've seen. Yet ballerina Victoria Tereshkina appeared to be dancing her own idea of Balanchine – and it was very odd. Tereshkina is an astoundingly powerful technician: the combination of her vertiginously long legs and fearless balance somehow make you feel she is dancing on top of a high mountain. But as Tereshkina worked her skills, with a wide, knowing smile on her face, her virtuosity was all out of kilter with the haunted romantic pulse of Serenade. It would have been far more appropriate to Rubies, the second ballet of the evening, but here, too, the lead couple jarred.

Irina Golub and Vladimir Shklyarov are fine dancers, but their tricky, central pas de deux looked under-rehearsed, and they compensated with a cartoonish excess of sluttiness and bounce. Underlying Rubies' sexy Broadway pizazz is a vein of menace, insinuation and mockery; the only dancer to grasp this was Ekaterina Kondaurova, giving one of the performances of her career as a vamp with a hypnotic edge of hauteur.

But the disconcerting erratic nature of this Balanchine evening was most evident in Symphony in C. The principals are a mixed bunch: Tereshkina sliced and diced a brilliant but unmusical path through the first movement, while Elena Evseeva waggled her shoulders and tilted her chin through a parody of flirtatiousness in the third. Set against them was Evgenia Obraztsova's rosy, classical prettiness in the final movement and Uliana Lopatkina in the second, who spun out Bizet's exquisite melodies in one unbroken thread of movement.

The corps are lovely throughout – yet it's the discipline and poetry of their dancing that makes the oddities at principal level doubly vexing. The Mariinsky have always performed Balanchine with their own Russian accent. But a positive babel of voices and attitudes now seems to be emerging. Unchecked, they could start to drown out Balanchine himself.

Pulse, phrasing and fascination

By Clement Crisp

Published: August 14 2009 03:00 | Last updated: August 14 2009 03:00

George Balanchine loved America, devoted 50 years to making classic ballet - as he had learned it in St Petersburg - an American art, and the history of New York City Ballet tells us so. But when the Mariinsky Ballet, his nursery, dances Balanchine, as the troupe marvellously did in a triple bill on Wednesday night, we know that the grain of what he produced was ever Russian. (The two poles of Balanchine's life in America were Tchaikovsky's Serenade , his first creation in the US, and the finale of Tchaikovsky's sixth symphony, made just before illness claimed him in 1981.) The Mariinsky dancers understand Balanchine, and find in his choreography ideas to which they respond with blissful skill.

Serenade , opening this programme, showed movement fully explored, from the moment when Viktoria Tereshkina first appears, vivid as a flame racing through tinder, to the last elegiac moments as she is carried off stage. The richness of Mariinsky pulse and phrasing in movement, the luscious sweep of the company's dancing, are ideally placed on the score: we become wholly involved in the choreography's dramas, the fascinations of its structure. (And admire the women's skirts, fuller, better, than in any other staging I know.)

How bright-cut the succeeding Rubies , so smart and streetwise in this account led by Irina Golub, Vladimir Shklyarov and Ekaterina Kondaurova. And so witty. I love Golub's impeccable legs and feet, her bright-eyed insouciance, and her ability (like Shklyarov) to dance off-beat, off-centre, and right at the heart of the choreography. I hugely admire Shklyarov's dynamic bravura, his happy way of dealing with every trick Balanchine threw at the danseur, and I love Kondaurova as the second ballerina, quick-witted, alert to every danced idea.

The closing Symphony in C is a familiar triumph with the Mariinsky, but no less breathtaking for that. (Its costumes by Irina Press are ideal, an added joy.) Each movement brings its delights: Tereshkina's rhythmic verve and clarity; Uliana Lopatkina producing marvels of serenest long-breathed legato, phrasing like an unhurried angel; Elena Evseyeva an enchantment in the third movement, admirably partnered by the elegant Filipp Stepin; Evegenia Obraztsova, a diamond sparkling through the presto. And the men, frankly, the best there are. The company offers dancing of effortless dignity, sunlit grace. Here's riches! *****

Homage to Balanchine/MariinskyBallet, Royal Opera House, London

By Clifford Bishop

There are several ways of looking at the Mariinsky Ballet's Homage to Balanchine, none of them entirely flattering. First it could be considered as a demolition job – not one executed with a wrecking ball, but a Fred Dibnah-style deconstruction that, almost lovingly, reduces something grand and venerable to so much rubble by compromising a few key bricks.

The evening opener, Serenade, to Tchaikovsky, is one of Balanchine's most architectural ballets, from the first moments when the ranked corps' outstretched, forbidding hands soften and louvre into graceful shades. Watching it is like becoming a camera, roving freely round some newly minted Parthenon. It can be analysed almost entirely in terms of flesh-and-blood metopes, pediments and friezes, the shifting scenes as much a play of light and fresh perspective as an act of choreography.

Balanchine puts in builders' jokes so elegant they seem an inevitable part of the structure, like the two sets of dancers who, by standing more upright the closer they are to each other, make a pair of flying buttresses that eventually scatter in confusion for lack of anything except each other to abut. He even decorates his ballet with the loveliest gargoyles ever made – a man, slowly advancing, with a woman pressed tightly to his back and covering his eyes with an outstretched hand.

When Serenade is well danced, this vision alone gives it an air of the metaphysical, a statement in abstract shapes about death and redemption. Even when the Mariinsky danced it, the image was beautiful. But it was no longer part of a great design, and this was what ruined a large part of the evening. The Mariinsky didn't show us around Serenade like artists, emphasising the whole, but like estate agents, pointing out a bunch of attractive features.

The torpor left by an unconvincing Serenade was so strong that we were nearly halfway through a carnivalesque second ballet before the audience remembered that it was allowed to have fun, even though Vladimir Shklyarov was clowning so hard in his efforts to remind us that he almost went over on his backside. In Rubies, pianist Ludmila Sveshnikova teased the dancers on as they laid bare the low-brow in Stravinsky's jazz-era Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra. Suddenly the girls were all Mack Sennett bathing beauties, and the boys all musclemen, or barkers, or urchins sneaking into the show under a loose piece of canvas.

Irina Golub will probably never be a huge star, because her limbs are in something like normal human proportions, but for years she has been the Mariinsky's sharpest ingenue-style ballerina. Here she made herself a one-woman fairground, whether tormenting her admirers as if she were the sparkliest, most unattainable sideshow prize, or swinging her foot high into the air like the mallet at a test-your-strength machine.

It was Rubies – tart and witty but looking somewhat displaced – that suggested another way of interpreting this Homage to Balanchine. It is normally performed as the middle section of a three-act ballet called Jewels. The first part, Emeralds, is a comparatively static dance to extracts from Fauré's Pelléas and Mélisande, where the women wear calf-length skirts (much like Serenade) and the shapes of the dance are more important than the dynamics (much like Serenade). The third part, Diamonds, is an elegant tribute to the classical tradition, with dancers dressed mostly in white, and set to a lightweight symphony.

Similarly, Homage to Balanchine finishes with Symphony in C, an elegant classically inspired dance dressed largely in white, to music by Bizet. Which raises the awful thought that the ballet company's new acting director, Yuri Fateyev, stitched it together on the theatre roof one lightning-filled night, cackling maniacally and picturing himself as the new Prometheus. But if this is a kind of "Frankenstein's Jewels", it is every bit as lopsided, pendulous and unlikely to produce offspring as that phrase suggests.

Symphony in C at least finishes the evening in style. Viktoria Tereshkina, Uliana Lopatkina, Elena Evseeva and Evgenia Obraztsova are by turns as regal, playful and tireless as the mercurial score demands. The Mariinsky's failings would be less frustrating if it weren't capable of near-perfection like this, or like the opening Swan Lake of the season.

Uliana Lopatkina is, almost literally, a dream of an Odette, her limbs seeming to move in some thicker, more supportive medium than air. So the occasional human impulse after some supernatural piece of floating, when she falls into the reassuring arms of Daniil Korsuntsev's Siegfried, for example, is like the tearing of a veil. But even beyond the reach of Lopatkina's spell this was a superb Swan Lake, with the most peripheral figures wholeheartedly living the drama, and believing the magic.