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Reviews

London Report

The Bolshoi Ballet, under new management, and the Royal Ballet at Sadler’s Wells: two great companies with something to prove

by Jane Simpson
copyright © 1999 by Jane Simpson
Autumn 1999

After one of the thinnest seasons of recent years, July saw the Royal Ballet and the Bolshoi playing head to head in London, opening and closing their seasons on the same days and even overlapping in repertoire—both of them showed us Giselle. The Royal Ballet, still in exile, were at the new Sadler’s Wells, whilst the Bolshoi were in the much grander and larger Coliseum, a fine dance house but at this time of year much, much too hot. Fortunately this could be the last time we have to suffer for the art of the big Russian companies: next year the Kirov, and the Bolshoi again in 2001, are due to be dancing in the new Royal Opera House, still an unknown quantity till its reopening in December, but guaranteed air-conditioned.

The Bolshoi had a lot to prove on this visit. Last time they were here, five years ago, they played in the huge arena of the Royal Albert Hall, giving only condensed versions of their repertory, and it was a critical disaster; the time before that, at the Coliseum again, they seemed at a low point in their history, with only Mukhamedov being universally admired. Many of the dancers on this tour were unknown even to the regular audience, and I doubt if a non-specialist would have heard of a single one of them. The Bolshoi name still carries its magic, though, and eavesdropping on conversations around me I often heard people who obviously still believe this is the top company in the world. Tickets were desperately expensive ; I don’t object so much to a top price of $150 as there always seem to be enough people willing to pay almost anything; but there were no seats at less than $24, and the regular audience really suffered. Even at these prices the season seems to have done fairly good box-office: the new Swan Lake sold out its three performances, and the only time I saw a huge number of empty seats was at one of the rather-too-many performances of Spartacus.

The Bolshoi opened with La Bayadère, reportedly against their will but at the insistence of their promoters, the Hochhausers. Despite, or perhaps because of, recent disappointments, there was a palpable feeling that the audience was willing them to succeed, and looking eagerly for something to applaud. Unfortunately, London has seen much better Bayadères than this, and better danced too. Dating from 1991, Grigorovitch’s production is a disconcerting mix of the over-elaborate and the perfunctory. Much of the clarity of the original seems lost in added decoration, whilst the ending is a complete anti-climax, with Solor collapsing on stage as Nikiya returns to the mountains down which the Shades have so beautifully glided. The collapse of the temple only happens in the programme notes.

The opening-night Nikiya, Nadezhda Gracheva, came as something of a surprise to many people. Neither particularly tall nor particularly thin, she’s almost a throwback to the old Bolshoi: dark and dramatic, at her best in the first two acts but less gripping in the pure dance of the Shades scene. Her rival was Inna Petrova, blonde and mechanical, giving a display of the sort of technically adept but characterless dancing which to me is ballet at its least engaging. The hero, Uvarov, for my taste is too lightweight, physically as well as in character; and I can’t take seriously a warrior prince who makes his first entry doing split jetes—Grigorovitch’s idea rather than his perhaps, but wrongheaded in either case. His Solor was rather pallid and unconvincing for the first two acts, especially in his Act 2 solo; but in the Shades scene he suddenly came to life and looked like a different dancer altogether.

Spartacus has been a huge favourite in London ever since the Bolshoi first brought it here, and it was indeed almost the only genuine success of the 1989 visit, largely thanks to the heroics of Mukhamedov in the title role. He had that combination of extraordinary technical strength and a hugely charismatic personality which is needed to convince us, and—as it turns out when he’s not there—to blind us to the extreme weakness of the rest of the ballet. It is nothing if not played with total belief by everyone on stage, and the Bolshoi at this stage of their existence have lost their belief. Neither the hero, Dmitri Belogolovtsev, nor the villain, Mark Peretokin, had the personality to dominate the house. Peretokin played Crassus as a blond dummy, and although Belogolovtsev has plenty of technique, it’s too light, too easy, to convey the heroic struggle of a leader of the people. The one success of the evening was Gracheva, as the courtesan Aegina—holding nothing back, and clearly enjoying herself, she ran away with all the good notices.

The company made rather a lot of publicity mileage out of Raymonda—rarely seen etc etc—necessarily, perhaps, as this was the least known to the general public and must have been much the hardest to sell. Even in its original form, there was not much of a plot in Raymonda, and Grigorovitch has removed most even of that, so that out of the whole three acts only about ten minutes are actually spent on the narrative. This makes the first act into getting on for fifty minutes of unrelieved classical dancing—something of a strain on the attention for the audience, and visibly taxing for the dancers. Indeed Raymonda is arguably the most demanding role for a ballerina in the whole classical repertoire—in solo after solo (seven in all) she has not only to hold the stage but also to convince us that each one is different in style and in dramatic purpose. Volochkova—blonde, beautiful, exquisitely schooled—lays out the steps with a perfect clarity, and articulates every arabesque and every luscious backbend with a creamy lucidity; but for me she is too even, too placid, to carry the whole long evening.

The ‘hero’—whose heroics are perfunctory to say the most—was Nikolai Tsiskaridze, who starts every step looking like the exciting dancer we’ve been hoping for, but ends rather a lot of them in disarray—‘finish’ doesn’t seem to be something he’s heard much about. The villain has much the best role dramatically, and much the most fun: Belogolovtsev was far more convincing than he had been in Spartacus, and his dance with his entourage came close to stopping the show. The classical soloists, as in Bayadère, were mostly correct but unexciting. The exception was the captivating Nina Kaptsova, a small dark dancer whose Act 3 solo finally brought the evening alive. She was reportedly equally successful in Maximova’s old role in Paganini, and is surely headed for greater things.

We had heard awful rumours about Vasiliev’s new production of Swan Lake, but reading his apologia in the programme, cogently and quite passionately argued, had made me reasonably optimistic. So it was all the more disappointing to see so little of his grand idea translated on to the stage. This is the production where there is no Odile—Siegfried, having fallen in love with Odette, quite naturally invites her home to meet his mother at the ball; and Rothbart is actually Siegfried’s father, who undergoes some sort of violent personality change at unpredictable moments. It’s possible to believe that this interpretation does make logical sense, but unfortunately it’s sense of the most banal variety, and too much of the choreography matched. Not the worst Swan Lake in the world, by any means, but not one worthy of the proud Bolshoi tradition, either. The audience thought it was all wonderful and were still cheering when I left, well into the curtain calls; the Hochhausers are said to wish they’d ordered more than three performances.

It would be interesting—well, fairly interesting—to see this again with a much stronger ballerina, who could possibly drive the action with enough conviction and passion to take our minds off some of the rest of the production. Anna Antonicheva—though people swore she was a great improvement on Volochkova the night before—was sadly lacking in either of these attributes, and even in a more conventional production I don’t think she would have made much impression. On the other hand the Sigfried, Sergei Filin, was much the most impressive of the company’s leading men—he looked like a Prince and had the dramatic weight we remember from Russian dancers in the past. The peroxided young man in the Jester-cum-Benno role—ubiquitous and far, far too ingratiating—didn’t get his name in the programme but I’m told he was Gannadi Yanin and that he was in London solely for this role.

Critical argument during the season focussed on the current status of the company as compared with their glorious past. You could choose from three possibilities: just as good as they ever were; or, recovering after a bad period; or, not good and getting worse. I’d go, rather cautiously, for the second one of those. Certainly I enjoyed the season more than the one in 1989, and I think on the whole it could probably be counted a success. It’s early days yet to judge the influence of the company’s new artistic director, Alexei Fadeyechev—appointed only at the beginning of the season—but backstage rumour speaks well of him and what signs there are point in the right direction. As well as the casts I saw, the 18 year old Svetlana Lunkina was much admired as Giselle, and when Nina Ananiashvili arrived, and especially when she appeared in Don Quixote, the notices improved dramatically. (It was a pity, though, that the one serious clash with the Royal Ballet meant that many people had to miss her only Nikiya in order to catch Carlos Acosta’s only Albrecht. I, with a long-standing family commitment out of town, was spared the decision.) The regular audience would very much have liked to have seen a more adventurous repertory, and I believe Vasiliev was very keen to bring some more modern works, but was dissuaded by the Hochhausers. Whilst one can’t altogether blame them for their conservatism, I hope that now they’ve seen the company reestablished they will take one or two more risks for the 2001 Covent Garden season.

As for the dancers, the company is obviously in transition, with the move being towards the young, tall, thin type that the Kirov also favours. (Though the success of Kaptsova, who only fits this stereotype in that she is undoubtedly young, shows that it’s not yet compulsory.) I did find the other female soloists better than ten years ago, when I remember them dancing with a mechanical archness that set my teeth on edge. What they are missing, perhaps for the first time ever, is a great male star, and I saw no sign of any amongst the younger dancers.

Meanwhile over at Sadler’s Wells, the Royal Ballet too had something to prove. Not seen in London for six months, they were offering a rather more adventurous repertoire than in their Christmas season, with only Giselle as guaranteed box-office; two quite interesting triple bills, and Ashton’s rarely seen and relatively unknown Ondine made up the programme. Despite worries that the presence of the Bolshoi across town would hit attendances—Sadler’s Wells is out of the main theatre district and unlikely to do much in the way of casual drop-in trade—the season sold reasonably well. This is by no means the first time that we’ve had two major companies competing for an audience—on occasions there have been three, all in larger theatres than this—and it is nice to know that London can still support these overlapping seasons, at least in the summer when there are plenty of tourists to help.

The season was hit by illness and injury. Even before it started, Jonathan Cope had to withdraw from all his scheduled performances, and both Darcey Bussell and Miyako Yoshida were out by the end of three weeks. Cope’s absence brought the most problems—Sylvie Guillem evidently finds no other Royal Ballet dancer acceptable to her, so the company had to bring Laurent Hilaire from Paris to dance with her in Giselle. In Guillem’s early days with the company, before she struck her close rapport with Cope, we often used to see Hilaire as her partner, and it was a pleasure to have him back. Guillem’s own performances in the classics are often problematical. This time she gave us a rethought Giselle, much more naturalistic than most and in itself a fine, cogent interpretation. Unfortunately it proved a complete mismatch with the rest of the production, which—as Guillem well knows, having danced in it often enough—is clear and well set-out but quite traditional in style. (It is now the oldest of the RB’s productions of nineteenth century classics, and the only one left that dates back to before Anthony Dowell’s directorship; compared with Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty it seems a model of restraint and tastefulness.) Even her appearance clashed; with her hair down to her waist and a thick fringe she looked more What Katy Did than Giselle, and I was left with the strong feeling that she had just lifted her performance straight out of her own new production (for the Finnish National Ballet), said to be much less stylised and formal than most. Though her dancing in Act ll was exquisite (apart, of course, from the occasional anachronistic arabesque), for me it is too self-consciously beautiful and the moments which stay in my mind are those when she stepped out of style into intensely expressionistic gesture.

The centre piece of the first triple bill was a revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s My Brother My Sisters, created originally for the Stuttgart Ballet, and one of the most successful of his one-act ballets. It proved a disappointment. A fine cast on paper, including strong MacMillan dancers Leanne Benjamin and Gillian Revie, on stage almost entirely missed the power and viciousness of earlier performances. The ‘Brother’ was Carlos Acosta, dancing strongly but with little indication that he knew what the ballet or his role were about; and though Benjamin was better than the rest, she was far less incisive than she can be elsewhere in MacMillan and could usefully have swapped roles with Revie, quite wrong as the sister who wears glasses. As this was framed by the amiable trivialities of William Tuckett’s Love’s Fool, brought in from the Dance Bites tour, and Ashley Page’s Fearful Symmetries—strong music, interesting set, lots of posturing and glaring at the audience. It was not a satisfying evening.

The second mixed programme had much more to offer, beginning with Serenade, out of the repertory for far too long. Darcey Bussell did the first night, very well by most reports, but then succumbed to an injured foot and the second cast, Zenaida Yanowsky, took over. The revival had been rehearsed by Karin von Aroldingen and, watching Yanowsky, it was clear that she had taken on board the NYCB way of dancing Balanchine; unfortunately the rest of the cast were still doing it the Royal Ballet way, much more gently and smoothly, and the contrast made Yanowsky look over-energetic and too emphatic. At times she was indeed overdoing things - much too audience-conscious in the Waltz, and making a real meal of the bit where she arrives late - but in a different setting this would have been a good performance. Christina Macdermott, substituting for the injured Yoshida, was nice in a Royal Ballet sort of way; Deborah Bull, seen more offstage than on these days, was the third soloist. For the record, the women do the last section with their hair still pinned up.

The new piece in this programme was another by William Tuckett, this time The Turn of the Screw. There is a basic choice to be made by a choreographer adapting a ballet from a novel: do you assume that the audience already knows the story, or not? Tuckett fell exactly, and disastrously, between the two, with a clumsy unfolding of the plot featuring both very detailed incidents incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the book, and divergencies from the original guaranteed to distract and annoy everyone else. If he gets the opportunity to do quite a lot more work on the ballet he could fix some of these problems, but it needs some really basic rethinking. In its current state it is a failure: the fall of the curtain leaves us puzzled rather than emotionally shattered. The effectiveness of the novel comes from the gradual descent from normality into horror, and from the fact that we never quite know if the ghosts are ‘real’ or if the governess is a neurotic, imagining the whole thing: both of these are lost in the ballet.

On the credit side, it is very well performed by the whole cast - principally Yanowsky again as the Governess and Mukhamedov as Peter Quint; and the sets are a very decided success. There is no fixed backcloth, but photographs of house, garden and so on are projected on a series of gauzes, which are arranged in such a way that the dancers appear and disappear in a very satisfyingly mysterious fashion. In fact it’s so difficult to sort out what’s happening that many people spent their first viewing looking more at the scenery than at the action. It’s a brilliantly conceived idea, and best of all, it’s the result of economy. Tuckett was told there wasn’t enough money for fixed sets and this was the designer, Steven Scott’s, solution. It’s also an almost infinitely adaptable idea; one critic wrote that it had advanced the cause of design for the ballet by ten years.

Last on in this bill was Ashton’s Rhapsody, created in 1980 for Baryshnikov and Lesley Collier. Two different casts produced two individual performances as good as any since then. Carlos Acosta, much the best we’ve seen in the lead since Baryshnikov, showed that even in a designedly show-off role such as this, virtuosity can serve the choreography rather than the dancer’s ego. Dancing with him, Viviana Durante gave a real ballerina performance, with the added confidence her guest appearances with ABT seem to have given her—polished, sophisticated, technically dazzling, she dances the surface of the ballet as nearly perfectly as one could wish; but the next night Sarah Wildor, smudgy footwork and occasional over-enthusiasm notwithstanding, danced the ballet’s heart. Her musicality and some combination of instinct and insight take her deep into Ashton roles, and her performance of this one was pure joy.

One of the undoubted successes of Dowell’s directorship was the revival of Aston’s last three-acter, Ondine, in 1988, though we’ve only seen it occasionally since then. Forty years on from its creation, the music is starting to reveal to everyone the sensuous beauty its admirers have long claimed for it - satisfying for Hans Werner Henze, but too late for Ashton, who had to dig very deep into his professional skill to compensate for the inspiration he’d hoped for when he commissioned the score. Sometimes it shows: not in the writing for Ondine herself, where Fonteyn as ever was inspiration enough, but in some of the corps de ballet work in the first act and a rather academic dryness in parts of the Act 3 divertissement. It’s an Opera House ballet and didn’t look at its best at Sadler’s Wells. There were some hiccups in the staging: the lovely oval frame of the shipboard scene was badly squashed the night I was there, and the lighting revealed rather too clearly the mechanics of how Ondine swims in the waves. More importantly, at Sadler’s Wells there is apparently no way of having steps down at the back of the stage, so that instead of Ondine walking up out of the sea in the last act, she arrives tamely from one side, ruining a great entrance.

Cope’s absence had led to some complicated shuffling of partnerships. Wildor lost her scheduled Palemon, Inaki Urlezaga, to Durante —but gained in the bargain as the RB had then run out of principal men and had to call back their old standby, Adam Cooper, giving him three days to learn the role. Durante had the opening night and was said to be excellent, not surprisingly as it was in this role that she had one of her first great successes ten years ago. Yoshida did one performance before injury took her out too, which led to Wildor doing several extra, including three in the last two days of the season. Her debut was successful enough for Anthony Dowell to announce her (long overdue) promotion to principal immediately afterwards.

I get the impression that a lot of people still don’t know quite what to make of Ondine. It’s scheduled for another showing the season after next, and I hope by then it will be accepted as a permanent addition to the repertoire—flawed, perhaps, but an essential part of the Ashton canon, and a gift beyond price to those ballerinas whose talents match its demands.