Grigorovich's Swan Lake in Covent Garden

Swan Lake, Bolshoi Ballet 2016 by Victor Hochauser, Standard YouTube Licence

Bolshoi Ballet, Swan Lake, Royal Opera House, 30 July 2016, 14:00

After seeing the live streaming of the Bolshoi's Swan Lake in January 2015 I wrote the following in Grigorovich's Swan Lake in Bradford 26 Jan 2016:

"Grigorovich's version of Swan Lake is different. As I have noted von Rothbart becomes "the evil genius". The show is compressed into two acts instead of three or four. There is no prologue explaining how Odette became a swan, no gift of a bow, no trip by the lads to the lake to try it out, the lovely divertissements in the royal palace in what is normally Act III are turned into a pitch by the various princesses and the whole episode takes place in Siegfried's imagination so that nobody has to jump into the lake in the last scene. Looking on the positive side there are expanded roles for the jester (danced by Igor Tsvirko) and also for von Rothbart danced by Belyakov.
Now I was brought on Ashton's version for the Royal Ballet which has been lovingly preserved by English National Ballet (see What Manchester does today 10 Oct 2014) and I have to say that I do prefer that version. I don't take kindly to change for change's sake when it comes to my favourite ballets such as The Nutcracker and Swan Lake but that's not to say that I am against innovation. Grigorovich's versions of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker do work though not perhaps as fairy tales as much of the magic of those stories is removed from them.
Overall I enjoyed the performance very much indeed. Tchaikovsky's magnificent score remains which was conducted well by Pavel Sorokin. Above all there was some glorious dancing. Particularly the pas de deux in the seduction scene in the palace. Rodkin and Zakharova are fine artists. His jumps and her fouettés were thrilling. They were both supported well by Tvirko and Belyakov and a splendid corps. Simon Virsaladze's designs did not show up well in the cinema but they may well have been more impressive on the Bolshoi's historic stage."

Yesterday I saw that production live on stage in Covent Garden. It was perhaps not quite the same as seeing it in the company's home in Moscow where I believe the stage is enormous but it was certainly the next best thing. My first impressions which I jotted down in BalletcoForum as soon as I returned from London were, however, very similar:

"I enjoyed it very much with two tiny reservations. I wasn't entirely happy with Grigorovich's libretto and I found the sets and costumes a little dowdy. However the important things were the choreography and dancing and I couldn't fault them at all. I was very impressed with all the cast - Nikulina and Skvortsov, of course, but also Georgy Gusev who danced the jester. His energy and virtuosity reminded me of Wayne Sleep in the 1970s."

The cast that I saw yesterday was different from the one I saw in the live streaming.  Anna Nikulina danced Odette-Odile, Ruslan Skvortsov Siegfried, Mikhail Kryuchkov the "evil genius" (or von Rothbart as I still prefer to think of him) and Georgy Gusev the fool (in the sense of court jester). Each and every member of the cast danced well.  I should say a special word about Gusev who impressed me particularly. with his energy and virtuosity. He reminded me of Wayne Sleep when I first took an interest in ballet in the early 1970s.

There was one anxious millisecond when Nikulina appeared to lose her footing that caused the person next to me to draw in breath sharply but it was barely perceptible from where I was sitting and she recovered immediately.

Notwithstanding the same niggles about the synopsis and the sets which I had mentioned in 2015, I enjoyed the show very much and I congratulate and thank everybody involved for a very good performance. It was well worth the 500 mile (800 km) trek to and from London.

I have to say that I found the audience a little grudging. The Bolshoi seem to come to London every three years or so (see the Bolshoi's Tours page on the company's website) and perhaps the Southerners are used to them but the applause was pretty sparing. At one point I think I was the only one clapping while the house lights were still dimmed and the spotlight was on the break in the curtains for the first curtain call by the principals. When Kryuchkov appeared at half time there was actually a bit of booing not because he wasn't good (he was fine) but because he was dancing the villain. I don't think they have many pantos in Russia so the poor bloke must have wondered what on earth he had done wrong. Nothing at all, mate! You were great. Finally, only Nikulina got flowers even though several other women artists deserved them too and even her bouquet looked like it had come from Tesco even though she had done her company and audience proud. Relations between our governments are a bit strained at the moment with lurid reports in The Times about propaganda units in Edinburgh, but that's no excuse for lukewarm treatment of the dancers. These fine artists are guests in our country and I for one am very glad that they are here.

The Bolshoi have brought a varied and interesting programme to London (see Bolshoi Ballet on the Royal Opera House's website). I have a ticket for The Taming of The Shrew which I liked a lot when I saw the live streaming (see Competition for Cranko: The Bolshoi's Taming of the Shrew streamed from Moscow 25 Jan 2016) and if it wasn't for the small matter of having to advise clients and prepare cases for court I would have seen The Flames of Paris and Le Corsaire too. 

Finally a word on the programmes. They cost a whopping £12. "You can see a whole ballet for that where I come from" I protested to the usher together with a whole lot of other North Country expletives. She replied with a sweet smile: "Well, ours cost £7 and the Bolshoi's covers the whole season so it's not bad value really." Put like that, perhaps she's right.

My Learned Friend at The Bolshoi

Peter Groves

Peter Groves is one of my instructing solicitors. He is also my friend. Like me he specializes in intellectual property (patents, copyrights, trade marks, registered and unregistered designs and the like). Like me he has a life outside the law. Whereas I exercise with pliés, tendus and ronds de jambe he runs. His practice takes him to Russia from time to time. Last Friday he was at the Bolshoi where he saw Spartacus. At my request he reviewed the performance. He tells me that it is his first ballet review. I do hope that it is not his last because I find it very interesting.

"I have to admit to being only an occasional ballet-goer, but a full-time music lover: so when my old friend Victor suggested that on my next flying visit (Friday evening to Sunday evening) to Moscow we might attend a performance of Spartacus at the Bolshoi Theatre it was the venue rather than the spectacle or the music that attracted me. Surely Khatchaturian was the worst sort of Soviet composer, kowtowing to party diktat, a pygmy beside Shostakovich: I had somehow inadvertently forgotten The Onedin Line (though I deliberately, for Shostakovich’s sake, put the theme music to Midsomer Murders out of mind).

Actually I find I did Khatchaturian a great disservice. Although as secretary of the Composers’ Union he was an establishment figure, he had more than his fair share of criticism, being denounced along with Shostakovich, Prokofiev and others as ‘formalist’. The more I visit Moscow, and the more I learn about Russian history, the more I realise that under whatever political system they lived most people just tried to get on with their lives, doing the best job they could under the circumstances. Put like that, was life here ever much different?

Reasoning that Mr Putin’s Ukrainian adventures meant that there would probably be no more affordable opportunity to go to the Bolshoi I agreed to the suggestion. The rouble has recently dipped below one penny, about half the rate I am accustomed to paying, so the estimated 12,000 roubles that a ticket agency would charge, though certainly substantial, was not prohibitive, and in the end it came out at a bit more than half that anyway. I could have put up with the worst excesses of officially approved Soviet music and ballet for the pleasure of a few hours in such an iconic building.

I have enjoyed several evenings out in Moscow with Victor in the past, and there was a precedent for his announcement that our tickets were not actually for adjacent seats. He gave me the ticket for the box in the dress circle, or “beletage”, a few doors along from the former Imperial (now, I was told, Putin’s) box, keeping for himself the seat in the highest balcony. Then we repaired to the buffet - Russian being a language of borrowed words - and there, naturally, we drank shampanskoye (Russian champagne) which is more than just a borrowed word. To be precise, it was Abrau-Durso, a protected geographical indication,  Victor told me, adding as he often does when we discuss intellectual property, that he had registered it himself. And very pleasant it was, though perhaps not the best form of refreshment to take after a long day travelling with an evening’s ballet to come.

Only one of the eight seats in the box was occupied when I took mine. That by a gentleman with suspiciously dark glasses who insisted I join him in the front row of three chairs. My assigned back-row chair was of a height more usually associated with bars, permitting a clear view over the other people in the box. His English being on a par with my Russian («Я профессор Российской академии правосудия»), it was with some difficulty that I ascertained that he was from Moldova. He was in town for a conference, and his delegate badge told me that it was a gathering of paediatricians. (Only as I write several days later do I realise that the Russian word for ‘doctor’, врач , is part of my limited vocabulary). Inevitably a party of three with tickets entitling them to the front seats then arrived: my new Moldovan friend had no better right to sit in one of them than I did. But the newcomers were very nice about it, and one of them spoke pretty good English, which was a bonus: I had apprehended an evening like one I spent at a concert at the Moscow Conservatory a few years ago, where a couple of ladies in the next seats valiantly tried to engage me in conversation.

The neo-classical Bolshoi theatre was restored to its former Imperial glory (with the addition of lifts, another loan-word) in 2011. It displays such opulence as to make the events of 1917 seem not just understandable but rather inevitable. The enormous curtains, for example, could have been woven from gold thread. And when they opened they revealed the most enormous stage, which seemed to go back for a hundred yards, in front of which a huge orchestra pit offered plenty of room for the 70-piece orchestra (two harps) and eventually, after Spartacus had met his gory end, even a choir.

Which makes me think: if Khatchaturian’s purpose in choosing the story was to satisfy Soviet artistic policy requirements, why this one? Oh, revolting slaves casting off their chains, that much makes sense. Spartacus has the Roman imperialists on the back foot, but his magnanimity towards Crassus backfires. Ending with the proletarian hero impaled on the imperialists’ spears struck me as off-message.

Grigorovich’s choreography dates from 1968, and this was the 307th performance of that production:. Other reviews I have read (such as this one of the same production, and most of the same soloists, from the New York Times, or this from the New York Observer, describing the production as “ghastly”) suggest that it shows. I might best describe a lot of it as clunky, although the principals - Denis Rodkin as Spartacus, Vladislav Lantratov as Crassus, Anna Nikulina as Phrygia and Maria Alexandrova as Aegina - seemed excellent and performed some extraordinary moves."

Rodkin, Lantratov, Nikulina and Alexandrova - Peter saw some of the Bolshoi's best artists. I am very jealous of him. I have yet to visit Russia but I have seen Spartacus on HDTV (see Spartacus - streamed live to Wakefield 21 Oct 2013). Nikulina danced Phrygia in that performance and to the best of my recollection she danced it very well.

Clara grows up- Grigorovich's Nutcracker transmitted directly from Moscow

The audience at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1858

Photo Wikipedia

I saw The Nutcracker in a whole new light this afternoon. Most of the productions of The Nutcracker that I have seen focus on the divertiseements in the land of the sweets culminating in the dance of the sugar plum fairy and her cavalier - Wayne Eagling's version for English National Ballet being the big exception (Cracking! 14 Dec 2013). Yuri Grigorovich version, which was transmitted this afternoon live from the Bolshoi Theatre to cinemas around the world, focused on a young girl's transitioning into womanhood and her falling in love with her nutcracker.

Accordingly, Clara (who is called Marie in the Bolshoi's version) has a much bigger role than in most productions. Today she was danced by Anna Nikulina a leading soloist with the company. Her partner was Denis Rodkin. In the interval Rodkin explained that his ambition to dance was fired by seeing a production of The Nutcracker on television in which Ekaterina Maximova danced. He asked his parents where he could learn to dance. They told him about the ballet school warning him that it would be no easy life. Undeterred he started ballet lessons and has not looked back since. As in the Eagling version, Clara dances the sugar plum role though in a white tutu rather than a plum coloured one. Similarly, the nutcracker dances the part of the fairy's cavalier. The ballet ends with Clara wearing a wedding veil.  But although Clara imagines herself as a young woman it is only a dream. She wakes up in her parents' living room  in her nightie with her nutcracker in her arms.

There were some other interesting touches. The mouse king, danced today by Vitaly Biktimirov, is a major character. He appears in the first act in a puff of smoke in the Stahlbaums' living room and disappears down a hole with the nutcracker in another puff of smoke in the second.  Eventually the nutcracker emerges triumphant bearing the mouse king's skin and crown. The second act takes place not in a land of sweets but in a forest dominated by an enormous Christmas tree. The divertissements are very slick each following in quick succession even before the previous dancers have left the stage.

The character who holds the ballet together in this version as in all others is, of course, Drosselmeyer. He is in every scene from the Stahlbaums' party to the apotheosis. Today Andrei Merkuriev danced Drosselmeyer.  Pensive, alert, inspired by brain waves, he was very well cast for the role.

As in all Bolshoi transmissions the ballet was introduced by Katherina Novikova. She is an excellent presenter. Fluent in English and French she is an incisive and perceptive interviewer. I had her in mind when I conducted my interviews with Gavin McCaig and Ernst Meisner and his talented young dancers.

Every time I see an HDTV transmission I notice something new. Today I noticed the floor of the stage give a little whenever a dancer jumped. Something I have never noticed even when I have been in the front row of the theatre.