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On Dance:
I. At Carnegie Hall last November, the Kirov Orchestra of the Maryinsky Theater, under the baton of Valery Gergiev (since 1996, the director of the Maryinsky, where he oversees the Kirov Opera and the Kirov Ballet), gave what was probably a once-in-a-lifetime chance to hear, as a concert offering, the complete score of The Nutcracker. From my own experience of having listened to Tchaikovsky's ballet score hundreds of times in the ballet theater and on records, with dozens of orchestras and conductors, I can testify that the Carnegie Hall performance was the most imaginative, the most stirring, and the most undanceable presentation of The Nutcracker that I have ever encountered. The storied first act was lavished with an attention to musical texture and dramatic shape that is more frequently accorded, say, to the tone poems of Richard Strauss. The dance for the toy soldier at the Christmas party, a minor entertainment in most stagings, was a major musical event here. The entrance for the grandparents became a great battlefield hymn. The passage for the growth of the Christmas tree in Marie's dream could have served for the launch of a manned mission to Mars. And the Waltz of the Snowflakes was practically symphonic, so seductive in its rhythmic advances and so various in its musical incident that it seemed we were being translated not into the softened retelling for children, by Alexandre Dumas pere, of a tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann, which served as the basis for The Nutcracker's libretto in 1892, or even into the Hoffmann story itself, but into a scene from Tolstoy, where you can almost assign a weight to the falling snow and count the birches from your sleigh. The theatrical fantasy invoked by the music alone was monumental and self-contained: in a word, heroic. At intermission, some irate theatergoers left, protesting that "there weren't any dancers" (a little puzzling, since the publicity for the concert had noted that there wouldn't be); but dancers would have added nothing. Indeed, they would have been at a great disadvantage, since the very musical gestures that made this concert an auditory treat, beginning with the emphases that seemed to well up from the emotive depths of the score rather than from the libretto, were precisely what would have made it frustrating for dancers to follow. Those concertgoers who returned for the Act II divertissement, each miniature presented as a crown jewel, were reluctant to let the musicians leave the stage, even after several encores. It brought home to a dancegoer just how little ballet audiences pay attention to music when dancers are present, and what gifts of character and compromise a serious ballet conductor must possess in a situation where several arts advance valid, competing claims. Gergiev is the most charismatic and persuasive partisan that Russian music has enjoyed in decades, and it is evident that the source of his strength is his devotion to the music's own internal cues to accent and meaning. In a concert situation, where this devotion can be exclusively pursued, his effect can be flabbergasting. As the overall director for one of the world's leading institutions of opera and ballet, though, he has the responsibility to look beyond the podium and the score to the proscenium, where singers, dancers, and designers of scenery, costumes, and lighting build a parallel universe, whose major purpose is to mesh with the orchestra, so that the effects of one cannot be distinguished from the impetus of all. Given Gergiev's titanic musical energies, it is unlikely that the Kirov will ever permit music to be less than first among equals, though his vision of the stage does seem to be widening. The New York audience first became aware of it in 1994, when he made his Metropolitan Opera debut conducting Otello. In 1995, as the artistic director and principal conductor of the Kirov Opera (a post that he had held since 1988), he brought the company to the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a repertory of one work--a wildly received production of Rimsky-Korsakov's rarely performed The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, in which the singers more or less just faced the house statically and sang. (In 1997, he was appointed the Met's first-ever principal guest conductor.) At the Met in 1998, the Kirov Opera returned with four more Russian works, by Glinka, Prokofiev, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky. In the two performances that I attended, the triumphs were emphatically musical, though dancing was featured center stage when called for, and the staging of the singers in Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery actually served to clarify the plot. In Borodin's Prince Igor, which I missed, the choreography for the second-act dances was a representation of what Michel Fokine had arranged for Diaghilev, who presented the second act as a free-standing excerpt. This would be an unusual effort by any opera company now, not only because Fokine's ballets have unaccountably disappeared from repertory, but also because opera companies are not typically committed to treating opera ballets as historical artifacts. One or two European ballet companies have performed Fokine's dances from Prince Igor in New York in recent memory; whatever choreography has survived is there to be had. But the Kirov went beyond that, including them in a full-length opera production, which even Diaghilev didn't do. It seemed a mark of respect for ballet that few people in the States expected from Gergiev, whose reputation here was that he had little use for anything as annoying as dance, a nuisance of an art, whose basic requirement of consistent tempi was fundamentally at odds with musical rhetoric, and flattened out the effects that musicians work so hard to put over. This past summer, Gergiev offered another ballet surprise: two weeks at the Met by the Kirov Ballet, which, for some four years, has been more or less directed by Makhar Vaziev, a dancer from the company who took over the job officially in 1997 and who, at the age of 38, may be the youngest artistic director in the company's history, as Lewis Segal pointed out in a revealing interview with him in the Los Angeles Times. Owing to the rather opaque circumstances (including criminal allegations), that surrounded the disempowerment in the mid-1990s of the Ballet's previous director, Oleg Vinogradov, after a tenure of eighteen years that seemed to have led the company into artistic decline, observers in Europe and elsewhere had resigned themselves to the inevitable. Like Britain's Royal Ballet, now in disarray, and the Royal Danish Ballet, which has been withering on the vine for one decade if not two, the Kirov seemed to have lost its position as a leading aesthetic force, providing one more sad example of the proposition that classical ballet is dying out in our time. Yet the Met appearance turned out to be alive with high expectations. The centerpiece was a lavish new production, employing over one hundred dancers, of The Sleeping Beauty, whose sets and costumes drew on designs and preserved examples from the original production in 1890, and whose staging, by principal Kirov dancer Sergei Vikharev, is based on extensive notations of Marius Petipa's choreography and elaborate staging, now in the Harvard Theater Collection, as well as on Vikharev's comparative checking of them against other productions in Russia and Europe. Dance critics have been helpful to this ambitious and vigorous attempt at reanimation. The person who deserves credit for bringing those notations to the Kirov's attention is Tim Scholl, an American dance critic and historian; and, as Elizabeth Kendall explained in Playbill, the Russian critic Pavel Gershanson served as Vaziev's assistant "turned ad hoc producer." The rest of the Kirov's New York programming also suggested international input from critical voices: An all-Balanchine evening (Serenade, Apollo, Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, Symphony in C); the Kirov's hallmark Petipa-inflected production of Giselle, complete with Wilis flown across the width of the Met stage; and the New York premiere of a long-lived curiosity from the Stalin era, Rostislav Zakharov's The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. This work was given its premiere in 1934 and was in fact Stalin's favorite ballet. The libretto, based on Pushkin, tells a bleak tale of young love destroyed (the hero is killed before intermission) and of a love triangle that leads to the deaths of two female characters, one through murder, the other through suicide. It is known in the West through excerpts in Russian dance films, and it is considered important here primarily as a vehicle for indelible performances by Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya in the ballerina roles. Still, this programming would be impossible without company hopes and labors going back decades. In 1983, when I visited St. Petersburg on a trip with a contingent of American dance writers, Vinogradov spoke of plans for a new production of The Sleeping Beauty to replace the current one from 1952, when Konstantin Sergeyev, with help from Fedor Lopukhov, radically reconfigured the production then in repertory, turning the remnants of what had survived from a revival following the revolution in 1917 into a mimeless, dancedriven spectacle. When the Kirov performed at the Met in 1989, however, it brought the 1952 version, virtually unchanged. The company's first Balanchine ballets were also acquired by Vinogradov: Theme and Variations (staged by Francia Russell) and Scotch Symphony (staged by Suzanne Farrell). Kirov dancers continued to perform Balanchine in the 1990s; early in this decade, in Washington, D.C., I saw an unusual rendering of Apollo (staged by Patricia Neary), with Altynai Asylmouratova as an unforgettable Terpsichore and Konstantin Zaklinsky in the title role, wearing heeled shoes in the manner of the Sun King of France, to whose musical era Stravinsky paid homage in the score. Nor are the Kirov and the Bolshoi the first Russian companies to dance Balanchine. That honor goes to a ballet company in Tblisi, in Soviet Georgia, where Balanchine was born; it was dancing Serenade in the 1980s. All this to one side, the Maryinsky under Gergiev's directorship seems to be a different breed of cat. Consider the Ballet's historical Russian programming. As the Kirov's recent Theater Annual makes crystal clear, it is part of a larger campaign to overhaul the theater as a whole and thereby to keep it going during mean economic times. The historical attitude that sought to restore The Sleeping Beauty to something that approaches its original condition, yet retains the 1952 production alongside it in repertory, belongs to the herculean spirit that are also being applied to the Opera, which, among other things, has just mounted a reconstruction of the original 1862 St. Petersburg production of Verdi's La forza del destino (Gergiev links it to the Opera's plans to celebrate the centennial of Verdi's death); and the presentation of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai reflects a new temper toward the Soviet past, admitting it as a strain of the country's identity, as in a new production of Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko, which was written to order in 1940 on the subject of a Soviet Realist novel. The productions and the festivals on the Maryinsky drawing board are so ambitious that Gergiev himself calls them "grandiose." Where is the money coming from? According to the Theater Annual, from the entire world. In 1993, Gergiev founded an organization called Friends of the Kirov Opera, and its current list of sponsors contains the names of individuals and corporations from across Europe. Meanwhile, the Maryinsky Global Advisory Board is taken up with the health of the entire theater--opera, ballet, and orchestra. Its patron is the Prince of Wales, who accepted the Russian sinecure at a time when ballet in Britain is nearly destitute. (The Royal Academy of Dancing, the oldest British institution devoted to ballet, has just decided to sell its core collection of exceedingly rare dance books--including one of only five known copies of a program for the Ballet Comique de la Reine from 1581, the oldest ballet on record--in order to pay for scholarships and to digitalize the rest of its library.) Patrons of the arts internationally these days are few; ballet and opera cost a fortune; and nationalism no longer seems to be a priority in their thinking. This is a turn of events that no one has ever seen before, and the repercussions of this globalization for ballet are major. Although the art has always thrived on the cross-fertilization that is the happy result of the miseries of exile and emigration of individual artists, its great centers have been associated with specific nations, in terms of their personnel, audiences, and support. Now everything is up for reassessment. It may well be that in returning to "originals," especially in its Russian repertory, the Kirov is actually pressing forward as an empire without borders. Whether this is a "good" thing or a "bad" thing is beside the point. The institution is trying to save its life as an elite artistic enterprise in a country so wracked by economic confusion and the predations of the greedy that art seems almost as frivolous a concern as it did during the Revolution.
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