To the international world of ballet, Clement Crisp was the British critic to fear for half a century. Crisp's dance reviews for the Financial Times – "the pink 'un" – from 1970 until 2020 were legendary for their passionate fastidiousness about ballerinas and high style, their acuity about rising talents and the difficulties of creativity, and – often – their ferocity, when he saw something he thought a blight.They were written with an unstoppable effervescence and expressiveness in language that sent readers hunting down their dictionaries for words like "borborygm Read more ...

Genius is as genius does, and Rudolf Nureyev made sure nobody was left in any doubt about the scale of either his talents or his ambitions. Based on Julie Kavanagh's biography Rudolf Nureyev: The Life, The White Crow pairs director and actor Ralph Fiennes with screenwriter David Hare to deliver an involving and often thrilling account of Nureyev’s rise to fame as a ballet dancer and his sensational defection to the West in 1961. It pulls off the tricky feat of being both successful drama and a plausible depiction of the rarefied world of ballet.In its recounting of Nureyev’s life from Read more ...

With forelock-tugging celebrations of a choreographer who died 25 years ago and a summer visit by the Mariinsky the highest-profile events in the calendar, 2017 may not be remembered as a vintage year for British dance. But there were striking moments aplenty if you knew where to look for them, and companies, directors and dancers making magic even in ordinary circumstances. As the year ends, theartsdesk correspondents cast their minds back and pick out the best of those magical moments. As always, the criterion is memorability: this is not a comprehensive review of who was worthy or Read more ...

Even tuning up, the multinational musicians of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra make a lovely sound, well-anchored by the tug of four period-instrument cellos and three basses, yet buoyant and stippled with upper-wind colours, flutes circling and dipping like a cliff-edge bird colony. Ideal, then, for the Hebrides Overture which opened this Mendelssohn matinee (★★★★).With the gentlest of rhythmic swells in the violins, just enough turbulence registered beneath the surface to give an early hint of what would become a subtly revisionist account, formed in the quietly authoritative hands of Pablo Read more ...

There are half as many performances of La Bayadère in this Mariinsky tour as performances of Swan Lake (four vs eight). The preponderance of Swan Lake is driven by audience demand, but if audiences knew what was good for them, they'd demand more Bayadère: this lavish, thrilling production catches the spirit of the Mariinsky far better than their rather pallid Swan Lake. And, as the audience at the Royal Opera House last night will attest alongside me, it's a fabulous, satisfying evening at the ballet.If you want to see ballet mime done competently, look to the Mariinsky Bayadère. Several Read more ...

There are two approaches to a triple bill: make all three pieces similar so you get one crowd with definite tastes, or make them very different so you have a chance of pleasing everyone. The Contrasts bill that the Mariinsky ballet showed at the Royal Opera House was, as its title suggests, firmly in the latter camp. Its three pieces spanned over a hundred years of ballet history, from the Imperial classic Paquita via a stylised 1960s Carmen all the way to Wayne McGregor's 2008 Infra.Carmen was created as a vehicle for Maya Plisetskaya, the great Soviet ballerina who died in 2015, and it Read more ...

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 ...

One of the most Russian things you can do in ballet is dance Don Quixote, which is 100 percent set in Spain. Don't think too hard about it, and definitely don't think too hard about the plot (which is barely there). The point is, the Mariinsky - perhaps the most pedigree ballet company in the world - are back on the Royal Opera House stage, and all ready for Britain's balletomanes to marvel at Russian training and tradition, and to perform the perennial comparison: who is best, Bolshoi or Mariinsky?Viktoria Tereshkina (pictured below right) is a very Mariinsky choice for Kitri: she is trained Read more ...

Just as the 200th anniversary is about to be celebrated of the great genius of 19th-century classical ballets, Marius Petipa, the creator of The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, half of Swan Lake, and many other masterpieces, his oeuvre's most remarkable reconstructor has died suddenly, aged only 55. Sergei Vikharev was the passionate pioneer of a brave new movement to install period sensibilities in an artform that had long become the plaything of its performers and coaches rather than its creators, and his death is devastating timing for ballet as well as for his family and Read more ...

There are certain roles where you’re lucky to catch one perfect incarnation in a lifetime. I thought I'd never see a soprano as Natasha in Prokofiev's War and Peace equal to Yelena Prokina, Valery Gergiev’s choice for Graham Vick’s 1991 production. When Vick directed a radically different take, also at the Mariinsky, in 2014, the Natasha was 25-year-old Aida Garifullina, born in Kazan so like Nureyev and Chaliapin a Russian of Tatar origins. Not only was she as beautiful and as youthful in spirit as the interim incumbent, Anna Netrebko, but like Prokina she seemed to live the intense emotions Read more ...

Does Alexei Ratmansky, former Bolshoi director and current world-leading classical choreographer, really love Prokofiev's Cinderella, or did he choose to create a new one for Australian Ballet in 2013 principally because he wasn't happy with his first (for the Mariinsky) in 2002? My bet is a bit of both: the second production, like the first, shines with an unfeigned affection for both score and story, but it also reads as a candy-coloured riposte to the usual adjectives applied to the 2002 production: ugly, spiky, uneven. If Ratmansky's first Cinderella was a tongue-scorching Wasabi pea, Read more ...

On Thursday the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra swooped into Cardiff for the ballet company’s only UK dates this year. Appearing at the Wales Millennium Centre for just four ballet performances, plus a family concert of Peter and the Wolf, the Mariinsky’s arrival does seem an extravagant indulgence by its backers, especially with the decision to show exclusively contemporary, Western-style, ballet programmes.Like the Bolshoi, the Mariinsky has at times acquired contemporary Western ballets, even during Soviet days, but in the past two decades the drive to westernise has intensified and Read more ...