Fauré - Stravinsky - Tchaikovsky : Jewels
Artists of the Bolshoi Ballet
Orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre
Pavel Sorokin
Balanchine's Jewels remains an extraordinary piece, the first, and I think still the only full-length, three-act, completely abstract ballet. This is a piece which has no other purpose save to exalt the beauty of dance and of dancers. It has taken a long time to come to the Bolshoi - their first performances were about 18 months ago - and I was very curious to see what this company would make of this piece, with its highly disparate styles of dancing in each section.
Fauré is never an obvious choice for music to which to set dance, though I retain very fond memories of Andrée Howard's La fête étrange, seen in the '70s with Scottish Ballet. For "Emeralds", the first act of Jewels, Balanchine selected extracts from Fauré's incidental music for Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande and for The Merchant of Venice, and they exude an air of gentle, courtly melancholy, an echo of times long past, evanescent and fading. The result is that "Emeralds" is frequently the weakest part of the ballet, often seeming wan, even dragging a bit. Evidently, based on this performance, what it takes is a little extra fire from the orchestra. Perhaps in stylistic terms, it wasn't ideal Fauré, but Sorokin drove this music with a vigour and colour it doesn't often possess, and that, in turn, helped lift the dancing to another level. Even if the girls of the corps here didn't quite, to my eye, have the fluidity required by this particular "French romantic" style of ballet, the overall effect was still lovely, elegant and gracious but not limp.
As much as the orchestra had lifted the Fauré for "Emeralds", they depressed the Stravinsky for "Rubies". This piece for piano and orchestra is not called a Caprice for nothing; it should be playful and petulant, spiky, a touch devilish, sly and sexy, and perfectly matched by Balanchine's choreography, which is also all of those things. "Rubies" is quite often performed on its own, and stands up well as another remarkable example of just how perfectly Balanchine understood Stravinsky's music. Tonight, the dancers played their part, but the orchestra and pianist did not. From the very first bar, this was a decidedly po-faced, straight-laced reading, and the pas de deux couple of the second movement (which was the best), Ekaterina Krysanova and Vyacheslav Lopatin, did very well to manage to inject some humour into the proceedings.
"Diamonds" is a celebration of the Russian Imperial (or, in short, Petipa) style, set to (most of) Tchaikovsky's 3rd Symphony, and was just as grandiose as you would expect from these performers. The timing was precise, the movements clear and strong, and the lead pair, rising star Olga Smirnova and Semyon Chudin, were perfect. He made her look lighter than air, supporting effortlessly with easy grace, and she was regal but never cold. Here was a different form of elegance from "Emeralds", more self-conscious, more assured, perhaps more artificial, but just as beautiful, an appropriately glittering conclusion to the performance.
[Next : 20th January]
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