Tchaikovsky : The Sleeping Beauty
Artists of the Bolshoi Ballet
Orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre
Pavel Sorokin
This lavishly designed Sleeping Beauty was produced by Yuri Grigorovich for the 2011 re-opening of the Bolshoi Theatre, after six years of renovations works. It's a single set, torsaded colonnades evoking a Baroque palace of gilt and marble, with an Arcadian folly painted on the back-drop, not so much a setting for the story, as a setting for the performance, grand and courtly. It's magnificent to look at, and Franca Squarciapano's costumes are equally splendid, but there is a distancing effect at play, as a result, and I found that it lacked magic, the mystery and illusion that is proper for a fairy-tale.
Of all the Tchaikovsky ballets, Sleeping Beauty is the one which retains the most of its original Petipa choreography, so Grigorovich's interventions were intermittent, and relatively discreet on the whole. That said, there were two or three really jarring cuts in the music, in the Prologue and right at the end, and it's indicative of Grigorovich's status to this day that nobody seems to have protested them. I could imagine, back in his heyday, that he could do as he pleased - his hacked-about Swan Lake is evidence enough! - but there's not much excuse for it in this day and age. Smaller companies make cuts because they cannot always field enough dancers on stage - the first scene of Act 2 is a regular casualty in that case, and here, though present, it was abbreviated - but the Bolshoi is hardly in that position, and surely a production intended for a celebratory event merited a full presentation, especially when the orchestra presents such a winning case for the music.
In this portrait of a ballet, it was the last act (or the Epilogue, as Grigorovich has termed it) that worked the best, the divertissement with its assortment of fairy-tale characters suddenly coming to life in a way that only Semyon Chudin's Prince had managed up to that point. That's not to say that there had been anything second-rate about what had been seen previously. The company was equal to itself, polished and confident, with Yulia Stepanova a gracious Lilac Fairy, while Olga Smirnova, with her cool, faint smile, was a poised, elegant Aurora.
When you come down to it, though, Sleeping Beauty is a difficult ballet to convey, because the style is more important than the content. It is static, the characters have almost nowhere to go emotionally, they simply are, they do not, cannot, develop, because there is no room for them to do so in the structure of the piece. So everything depends on how urgently the performers can put across the moment, the instant in which they find themselves, and in which we observe them, and that was a little distant. Chudin conveyed some eagerness, but the Transition - that wonderfully mysterious, eerie music after the Panorama that leads up to the breaking of the spell - is not well handled in Grigorovich's version, not enough sense of adventure, of danger.
The Wedding, however, did have that touch of excitement to it, and all the divertissement numbers were excellently rendered, with a charmingly crisp quartet of Jewel Fairies, a fresh, light Bluebird pas de deux from Anastasia Denisova and Artemy Belyakov and, best of all, the delightfully sly, teasing White Cat and Puss in Boots of Victoria Litvinova and Denis Medvedev. In this context, Smirnova and Chudin were magnificent, fluid and regal, effortless and dazzling. What a pity one of the worst cuts telescoped the Mazurka and Apotheosis so clumsily right at the end.
[Next : 24th January]
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