BALLET HEADLINERS OF THE YEAR From the Desk of Genevieve Bresson, Jean-Etienne Flamand, Luba Terechenko, Vladimir Pedrovich and Florence Desmoulins
BALLET: Kirov Ballet triple bill. At The Royal Opera House, London
The
opening night of the Kirov Ballet's Homage to Diaghilev program, while
promising much, proved a surprisingly muted affair. The evening opened with
Chopiniana, Mikhail Fokine's moonlit reverie. Known in the west as Les
Sylphides, the ballet has a delicate ethereality that is intended to evoke the
Romantic ballets of the 1830s and 40s. An early fall by one of the principals,
however, appeared to unnerve the ensemble. Thereafter, although all the
dancers were moving and breathing as one, tension and caution were evident at
all levels. Only Irina Golub seemed unaffected; she danced the Prelude with
beguiling, unhindered lightness. Chopiniana was followed by Les Noces,
Bronislava Nijinska's danced account of a Russian peasant wedding. Its harsh,
inexorable score was created by Igor Stravinsky and, like The Rite of Spring,
the piece emphasises the idea of the individual sacrificed for the common
good. We discover the men and women in austere, cell-like buildings, leaping
and stamping as they prepare the Bride (Alexandra Iosifidi) and the Groom
(Ivan Popov) for the marriage ritual. Identifiable only by the white
handkerchief on her head - otherwise, she is in the same drab brown as the
others - the Bride is presented to her spouse in a building that looks as if
it has hosted military tribunals. In front of them, the massed ranks of the
corps dance out grim, constricted sequences. Les Noces, created in 1923,
recalls the Russia of the tsars, but it is also a graphic prefiguration of
Stalinist collectivism. It is an elementally powerful piece. However, the
Kirov danced it for the first time only last month, and have not yet quite
made it their own. One to revisit, perhaps. Only with Schéhérazade, Fokine's
orientalist fantasy, did the evening come fully alive. Svetlana Zakharova was
a fabulously glamorous Zobeide, and Faroukh Ruzimatov, reining back the Fry's
Turkish Delight-style histrionics with which he has invested the role in the
past, a potent and sensual Golden Slave. The Chief Eunuch (Igor Petrov) is the
Benny Hill of classical ballet, perspiring helplessly before the orgiastic
goings-on.
Fokine, who created the piece for Diaghilev in 1910, clearly enjoyed the story's sly sexual inversions. The all-powerful Sultan (a glittering and malevolent performance by Vladimir Ponomarev) is controlled by his supposedly powerless wife, and Zobeide's lithe young lover is happiest when worshipping at his mistress's knees. Zakharova departs the Kirov shortly for the Bolshoi, leaving a vacancy in the snake- hipped enchantress department. She will be missed.