The Kirov Ballet and the Fish that Got Away

While I have had wonderful tastes of the Mariinsky dancers during the various opera performances, my first experience of a complete evening of ballet took place on Wednesday when I saw Spartacus. The work, with a rousing score by Aram Khachaturian, actually had its premiere in the same house in 1956, four years before the appearance of the well-known movie on the same subject. In a nutshell, Spartacus, his wife Phrygia, and his friend Harmodius are slaves in ancient Rome, under the tyrannical leadership of Marcus Crassus. After witnessing Crassus cause the cruel murder of a slave who stumbled, Spartacus decides to lead a slave rebellion. The rebels are victorious for some time until Crassus's seductive courtesan Aegina succeeds in causing a rupture between Spartacus and Harmodius and their respective supporters. Divided, the rebels are soon conquered, leaving a distraught Phrygia to mourn the loss of her husband.

The ballet opens with a triumphal procession of Marcus Crassus, which at the Mariinsky involved over 100 people, including at least 50 men (some were buff supernumeraries rather than dancers). Danila Korsuntsev was dashing in the title role, and Sofia Gumerova and Ekaterina Kondaurova were respectively moving and seductive as the faithful wife and the femme fatale. The choreography that I saw, based on the original choreography by Leonid Yakobson, was graceful, musical, and certainly full of spectacle. Apparently it was considered controversial at the time, because Yakobson completely dispensed with toe shoes so the women were never dancing en pointe. This seemed more than appropriate with the ancient Roman costumes.  However, the better-known version of Spartacus is the second Bolshoi staging by Yuri Grigorovich featuring not only toe shoes but striking athleticism.  Here is the Grigorovich/Bolshoi staging of the famous Act III Adagio. This next video claims to be the same in the Yakobson staging, but is actually a passage in Act II with the same musical theme. Other passages from both stagings are also available on Youtube

As in the case of "the artist formerly known as Prince," to me the Mariinsky ballet is "the company formerly known as Kirov." Kirov was the name used by the company during the Soviet era, and still used when the company goes on tour since it is good for box office. In St. Petersburg, though, the name Mariinsky has been restored and the name "Kirov" has been relegated to the same purgatory as the thankfully abandoned "Leningrad."

Delighted with Spartacus, I eagerly looked forward to seeing Bayaderka (La Bayadère) the following Saturday. La Bayadère, like its better-known sibling, the ballet version of Don Quixote, was originally choreographed by Marius Petipa (arguably the most important choreographer of all time) to a score by Ludwig (a.k.a. Léon) Minkus. The ballet premiered in 1877 here in St. Petersburg.  La Bayadère is principally known in the west for its famous scene, "The Kingdom of the Shades."  Each member of the corps de ballet enters on a long zig-zagging ramp, strikes an arabesque, and steps forward, making room for the addition of the next dancer. This continues in achingly beautiful symmetry until all 32 dancers have entered. It may not sound like much, but when you see it, it is breathtaking.

Up until 2000, more than a century after its premiere, for various reasons well-explained in the unusually thorough wikipedia article, the original four-act version of Bayaderka had never been seen or even heard in the west. In that year, the Mariinsky ballet began assembling a reconstruction of Petipa's 1900 revival of the work, which had been preserved in dance notation since that time. The restored version received a mixed response in Russia, but was rapturously greeted when the Kirov took it on tour to London and New York.

So on Saturday I arrived at the Mariinsky Theatre well prepared in the the history of this important work, eager to see the world's only production in 100 years of the original version, presented in the city of its premiere. Alas, for the first time in St Petersburg, I was unable to get a ticket as every seat in the theatre had been sold! I hovered near the entrance of the theatre, certain that at the last minute some wife would have failed to convince her husband to join her at the ballet, to no avail. Apparently husbands in Russia are either more docile or more interested in ballet than in the US, or both. I will have to await the return of the ballet in November.