Mariinsky
Ismene Brown
For a few very lucky competition winners there is a shopping trip where they are paraded around the world. A terrific opportunity, though a horrible experience, probably. Most competition winners have only a new line in their CV to stare at after the award ceremony, so the advantage of being a 2015 Tchaikovsky laureate, with a promise of an international tour with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, is self-evident.It also launches high expectations, given that Gergiev was also the competition’s chairman, and this year more than any the Russians were anxious to show that only talent Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
You usually know a good piece or performance when you see one, but sometimes you only identify a great one as such significantly after the fact. What better way to test a work's durability, then, than by seeing what remains of it in the memory after six or 12 months? I admit this "best of" exercise is pretty subjective, but 2014 was such a rich year for dance that I've had to be ruthless: an item only makes my list if I still feel excited when I recall it.This list doesn't sum up the whole year by any means. Some of the biggest events don't get a look in – the Royal Ballet's new Winter's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Of course unavoidable circumstances do strike, and concerts do get delayed, but it’s astonishing just how often those circumstances seem to conspire against Valery Gergiev. Last night’s UK premiere of Rodion Shchedrin’s opera Levsha – the second night of a Mariinsky triptych of performances at the Barbican – started a nice round hour late, which was a real shame because once the drama shifted from offstage to onstage the work revealed itself as a bit of a gem.Based on a story by Nikolai Leskov (he of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District), the opera’s plot is less about unfolding narrative Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s one of the ironies of life and art that Prokofiev’s tenderest and most romantic opera was composed at a time when he was abandoning his wife in favour of a Moscow literature student half his age. Betrothal in a Monastery is a setting in Russian of an opera libretto by Sheridan about the attempt of a Spanish grandee to marry off his young daughter to an elderly fish merchant. Like most comic operas, and some not so comic, it’s set in Seville; the wife Prokofiev was walking out on was Spanish.The trauma of such events naturally plays little or no part in the opera, which is a Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The Edinburgh Festival reserved its biggest operatic event for last. From St Petersburg, the Mariinsky Opera brought a production of Berlioz’s Les Troyens that could truly be described as epic: a stellar cast, a vast trompe d’oeil set, and an overall duration comfortably over five hours. A large audience greeted it enthusiastically, but not ecstatically. Maybe exhaustion had set in: there were yawns and smiles in equal measure on the way out.Les Troyens is really two operas. In the first two acts Troy falls to the Greeks after the naïve defenders ignore the prophecies of doom from Cassandra Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It sure feels like longer than three weeks since the Mariinsky rolled into town – at least if you’re one of London’s ballet fans. Non-balletomanes might be wondering whether the feverish intensity with which the company’s doings are followed, its form analysed, its health diagnosed, is disproportionate, a case of collective hysteria stoked by cultural stereotypes about Russians and the absence of other ballet offerings in late summer.After all, most touring companies are seen for what they are, a collection of more or less good artists, under a more or less good artistic director with a more Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This was the most eagerly anticipated programme of the Mariinsky visit - something old, something borrowed and something new. The old, that colourful fairytale of Stravinsky’s lush, melodious youth, The Firebird; the new, a recent acquisition by the Londoners’ favourite Russian, Alexei Ratmansky; and the borrowed, something from English ballet legend, Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, once kept under glass with the Fonteyn and Nureyev myths, but eventually released from the museum by Sylvie Guillem and Nicolas Le Riche a decade ago.The Ashton has now suffered the fate its Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The ballerina claque wars that generally accompany visits here by the Mariinsky Ballet are raging particularly feverishly this year, but it all falls silent when Uliana Lopatkina makes one of her increasingly rare appearances. So much noise is focused on legginess or hip flexibility of these size-zero ballerinas, and yet the Mariinsky knows more than any other company in history that it is not body but mind that matters in the final analysis. Their luminous historical legend Galina Ulanova was nothing to look at physically, until she started dancing.Lopatkina once set the new bar for 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 ...
Hanna Weibye
One of the reasons I always tell ballet sceptics to give Romeo and Juliet a go is that any production with halfway decent lovers and a vaguely competent rendition of Prokofiev’s score should convince them that this art form isn’t just about swans and sugar plums. The venerable Mariinsky Theatre Ballet of St Petersburg ought, of course, to have dancers and musicians much better than decent, and in its revival of the original 1940 Leonid Lavrovsky version it has a production of great historical weight, yet the St Petersburg visitors were met with only lukewarm appreciation the last time they Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
La Bayadère is one of the ballets I recommend to people who have never seen ballet before. It has high drama, exquisite tragedy, fabulous costumes, one of the best "white" acts going, and it almost passes the Bechdel test. Sitting in a mostly empty Vue cinema in Harrow watching last night’s live broadcast from the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, I had a chance to try my own prescription. If it were my first experience of ballet, would this 19th-century gem as beamed worldwide by the hallowed Russian company for whom it was originally created, convince me to splash considerably more cash Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
The seasonal Nuts-fest continues (and culminates) with another two to add to the roast – live: English National Ballet’s recent production, and digital: the Mariinsky Theatre’s 3D film version. To the cinema we go. This is the first 3D Nutcracker ever, following the Mariinsky’s 3D Giselle last year – and the screening of dance is a good thing, as few can afford to fly the world over to see a number of Nutcracker productions.The 3D aspect makes the experience more tangible. The best moments are the aerial shots when you feel most interspersed, but as the 1934 Vassily Vainonen version was Read more ...