Swan Lake
Jenny Gilbert
In a week that saw the Royal Opera House lit up in the colours of the Ukrainian flag and its orchestra playing the Ukrainian national anthem, many theatres and concert halls found ways to express their sympathy for that country’s desperate plight. On Thursday the Barbican, celebrating its 40th anniversary with a performance of Haydn’s Creation by the LSO and LSO Chorus, held a two-minute silence before the start but forgot to tell the audience, who sat there wondering if the soloists were stuck in the tube-strike traffic. At both venues, management spoke of “the humanitarian crisis”, a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Matthew Bourne Swan Lake has become a classic. And – lest that word conjure up dusty tomes and a niggling sense of obligation – this is definitively not the old-but-worthy, improving-but-dull kind of classic. This is the "where has this been all my life" kind, the "I've got to tell all my friends and relations" kind, the "blimey, I'd forgotten dance could be so good" kind.Twenty-three years – and many revivals – have come and gone since the male swans first went a-swimming in 1995, and Bourne and designer Lez Brotherston have given the show a face-lift for this run, updating some costumes Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
A new Swan Lake at the Royal Ballet is a once-in-a-generation event. Liam Scarlett, choreographer of the production that opened this week, was a babe in arms when its predecessor was created by Anthony Dowell and Yolanda Sonnabend in 1987, and – given the evidently lavish investment in the new show – the Royal Opera House accountants at least will be hoping Scarlett is a pensioner before his interpretation is retired.No small pressure, then, on Scarlett and perhaps even more on designer John Macfarlane. Swan Lake is, famously, a malleable classic, whose main ingredients of lakeside, swans, Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It's a Cinderella story: Xander Parish was plucked from obscurity in the Royal Ballet corps and trained by the Mariinsky to dance the greatest roles in the repertoire. Now, not only is he the first Briton to join the historic Russian company, he has also just been promoted to Principal after last night's performance of Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House.To make the move on his home turf like this seems like the crowning move in a canny publicity campaign that has seen Parish in newspaper interviews and on the Today Programme in recent weeks. The hype around him has been carefully built over a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Koen Kessels is on a mission to change the culture around music in ballet. Anyone who has heard the Belgian conduct will know that he is the right person for the job: Kessels makes the classic scores come alive in the pit like nobody else I’ve heard. I will never forget a performance of Swan Lake with Birmingham Royal Ballet in which he had us all pinned to our seats with excitement, shaping every phrase of the familiar music as if it had never been heard before. This gift has brought him the top music job at two of Britain’s major ballet companies, the Royal Ballet in London and Birmingham Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
"If you know anything about dance," I was told last night by an aged balletomane at the Royal Opera House, "you know that Russian ballet companies are the best." If this is true then the Bolshoi Ballet, biggest of the Russian companies, in Swan Lake, that most quintessential of ballets, must be awe-inspiring.In many ways, it is, and deliberately so. Yuri Grigorovich's production may be less bombastic than his Sleeping Beauty, but it's still heavy on grandeur and light on naturalism. Instead of a forest or pastoral setting for Act I, Grigorovich presents a dignified, ruthlessly scripted and Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Graeme Murphy's 2002 Swan Lake for Australian Ballet stitches together plot elements from Swan Lake, Giselle and Lucia di Lammermoor, among other things. No bad thing, that; such mash-ups can work well (see Moulin Rouge), and Matthew Bourne proved way back in 1995 that Swan Lake's story can be totally reconfigured and still work gloriously (we do not talk about the 2011 film Black Swan). But last night's peformance at the Coliseum places Murphy's work for me in the category of might-have-been; lacking either Bourne's mastery of storytelling or Moulin Rouge's campy extravagance, his Swan Lake Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It was business as usual in the British dance world in 2015. Looking back over the year, theartsdesk's dance critics see the industry's many talented, capable people continuing to do their jobs well, but we don't recall being shaken, stirred or surprised as often as in other years, or at least not by new works: our top moments of the year are concentrated in the farewells of great dancers Sylvie Guillem and Carlos Acosta, and in classic productions of classic ballets.What follows is our personal map of 2015's dance uplands. As usual with such lists, it doesn't tell the whole story. For Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Swan Lakes are not created equal. In fact they are not even created the same: ballet is the art form with the evanescent repertoire, in which First Folios – or any folios – are singularly scarce. Even with a classic as beloved as Swan Lake, there is no stable text apart from Ivanov's lakeside choreography for Act II and Tchaikovsky's score (though not even all of that). If a production shines in any other respects as well as these, the credit is due to the creative team and the company – so let's bring the house down for Birmingham Royal Ballet and the utterly splendid Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
St Petersburg Ballet Theatre is a phenomenon of the new Russia: not anchored in centuries of history or state patronage like its neighbours the Mariinsky and the Mikhailovsky, but founded as a commercial venture in 1994 by Konstantin Tachkin, a wannabe impresario with no balletic training. It tours widely, and evidently has no difficulty selling out foreign theatres – including the Coliseum for Swan Lake last night – with a combination of recognisable productions and "Russian ballet" cachet.The centre of the company's hard sell is their prima ballerina, Irina Kolesnikova, who on this London Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The twelve days of Christmas may be over, but I have good news for ballet fans in London: a whole new batch of presents for you has washed up at the Coliseum, and it's overflowing with lords-a-leaping, ladies dancing, and swans-a-swimming. In Derek Deane's production (a vast improvement on his 1997 arena version for the Royal Albert Hall) English National Ballet really have a gem of a Swan Lake: even where I disagree with Deane's decisions, I find the whole package intensely likeable. And when, as happened last night, there are stupendous principals performing the main roles and a corps Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
For a dance company, the always delicate balance between preserving your heritage and creating an exciting future becomes especially hard to negotiate when you are the most venerable institution in your field. The Mariinsky Ballet, now on tour in London, have this problem magnified by a general perception (theirs and the public’s) that they are the world’s keepers of the great Russian ballet tradition, which they are expected to represent at its finest. For a cocktail of reasons – a dash of genuine history, topped up with a large splash of public perception, and garnished with the promoters’ Read more ...