KIROV BALLET.

KIROV BALLET METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE JUNE 28-JULY 10, 1999

A lot of water has flowed along the Neva since St. Petersburg's Kirov Ballet of the Maryinsky Theatre--a cumbersome title from which the subtle might extrapolate a pocket-history of Russia in the twentieth century--was last here. The company is substantially changed with a whole new generation of young ballerinas. During those four years, the then-new regime of Valery Gergiev, artistic and general director, and Makhar Vaziev, director of the ballet company, has had time to settle down. And what were they bringing us as its latest novelty? The Sleeping Beauty.

Now, the Kirov has offered The Sleeping Beauty many times in New York, but this time it was with a profound--one might say revolutionary--change. For earlier this year, it had decided to turn back to the Czarist era and to remount a facsimile of the Maryinsky's most celebrated historic production, the Marius Petipa-Tchaikovsky Sleeping Beauty of 1890. So did this new/old Sleeping Beauty awaken with a magic kiss? Yes, but she was a little shaky, even dozy, from her 109-year-long nap.

I consider the history, the methodology, the validity, and the authenticity of the production in this month's "Attitudes" column in this magazine [see page 122]. Here I concentrate on the performances, although I must say that, decoratively and choreographically, this production with the restaging supervised by Sergei Vikharev was indeed historically fascinating. The choreography, although a fair remove from any Soviet version and much fuller, is not all that different from that used by Britain's Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, or the New York City Ballet.

The dancing was stylish and generally excellent; the Kirov has always lavishly demonstrated the Petipa style even when it skated over or changed the Petipa choreography. However, on the first night neither Svetlana Zakharova nor Igor Zelensky seemed to be dancing at the top of their form, and certainly Zakharova's "twelve o'clock high" extensions looked stylistically out of place.

During the first three days of the season there were four different ballerinas, including Zakharova, as Aurora. The new Kirov management is clearly placing enormous emphasis, especially for this New York engagement, on the company's youngest entries. It seemed ironic that it was its peerless senior ballerina, thirty-nine-year-old Altynai Asylmuratova, who gave the most delicately nuanced and well-rounded portrayal of Aurora at the Wednesday matinee, partnered by the smiling, effortlessly suave competence of Andrian Fadeyev. Diana Vishneva had coruscated during the second performance, but at the production's fourth and final showing of the season, the technically adequate Irma Nioradze glimmered rather than sparkled, although admittedly she elicited more vibrancy from her partner, Zelensky, than he had shown earlier with Zakharova.

Highlights among the rest of the casting were Islom Baimuradov's melancholy and brooding figure of the wicked fairy Carabosse at all performances, and Daria Pavlenko's charming and beautiful Lilac Fairy. The very young Anton Korsakov (who became a clear audience favorite during the season) and Irina Zhelonkina proved the best pick in the Bluebird pas de deux.

At all these Sleeping Beautys, in the pit the Kirov's Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda handled the company's orchestra in a manner animated enough to qualify as a dance performance in its own right.

The push toward youth typified by its Sleeping Beauty was equally evidenced by the season's six performances of Giselle--each with a different eponymous heroine. The only performance I missed during the season was Asylmuratova's Giselle, but I am sure she was as stylishly poetic as ever. I did see the five debutantes. These were Vishneva and Maya Dumchenko, both partnered by Fadeyev, Zakharova with Zelensky, and Natalia Sologub matched with Viacheslav Samodurov. All the ballerinas, in various ways, revealed that pristine glistening only really captured by young Giselles in their salad days. The sixth Giselle, saved for the last night of the season, with Zelensky here in particularly fine form as Albrecht, was Nioradze, better in the second act than first, but on the whole providing a disappointing portrayal.

All four of the other young ballerinas left their first, but very personal, signatures on the ballet. Zakharova acted tellingly with the most assurance; Vishneva showed an individual brilliance and delicacy; Dumchenko charmed with a touching pathos; while Sologub (still listed in the corps de ballet) showed enormous promise both in dance and characterization. This marvelous quartet of Giselles was matched by the strong dancing of their Albrechts, although compared with their fervently naturalistic ballerinas, the acting of the men--like that of the two stalwart yet essentially boring Hilarions, Ilya Kuznetsov and Nikolai Godunov--appeared conventional to the point of inexpressiveness.

Despite its exquisite period settings by Igor Ivanov, all very Alexandre Benois in their period feel, the current Kirov staging appears over-formalized and oddly undramatic. For one example, the Peasant Pas de Deux was introduced purely as a divertissement, without the slightest attempt to include it in the dramatic context of the ballet. The production, choreographically more or less the standard Petipa recension, is not attributed to anyone, although it names a "Revival Consultant," the respected Russian critic Yuri Slonimsky, who died in 1978. It could do with far more directorial attitude and sense. Undeniably, it is beautifully, sensuously danced, not least by the superbly uniform female corps de ballet, particularly in the second-act scene. It was incredibly well lit with the ghastly ghostly pallor of the Wilis, those implacably vengeful ladies returned from the grave. Unquestionably, the present glory of the Kirov is on its distaff side, and both Tatiana Amosova and Elvira Tarasova particularly were impressive as the Wilis' spectral leader, Myrtha.

Apart from The Sleeping Beauty, the only novelty mounted during the two-week season was that wonderfully revered old Soviet ballet The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, which was given its very belated U.S. premiere on July 6. This melodramatic, blood-and-thunder tearjerker, based on a Pushkin poem, was made for the Kirov in 1934. It was the first ballet to be created by the notable choreographer Rostislav Zakharov, and has remained a staple in its repertory. For many years it was also given by, among many other Soviet troupes, Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet.

The poem is on a theme dear to Pushkin's heart, that of spiritual regeneration. It shows a brutal Tatar chief, the Khan Girei, emotionally redeemed by tragic love for a young Polish princess, Maria. It should be added that he and his pagan hordes first abducted Maria after slaughtering her lover, her father, and seemingly everyone else in sight, and burning down the castle. Maria is finally slain by the Khan's jealous favorite wife, Zarema, who then is thrown to her death off a parapet. So this Khan might well be thought a prime subject for spiritual regeneration, which he achieves by building the namesake Fountain of Bakhchisaray as a monument to his unrequited love.

Despite its pallid music by Boris Asafiev, the style of the ballet is instant drama, showing what the Soviets called "socialist realism," but which was not so far removed from the dance-acting reforms proposed by the pre-Soviet choreographer Michel Fokine at the turn of the century. Bakhchisaray shows some similarities with Fokine's Sheherazade and Prince Igor, but even more with the heavy histrionics of those Soviet silent-film epics. Although created for the Kirov, the Bolshoi actually danced it a lot more convincingly; some of this current version seems pale indeed from my memories of the Moscow production at Covent Garden in 1956, starring both Raisa Struchkova and Marina Kondratieva as Maria, and the still readily available video [1953] with Ulanova as Maria and Plisetskaya as Zarema.

All four performances of Bakhchisaray had different lead casts, with only Vladimir Ponomarev, as a glaring-eyed but very dull-presenced Khan Girei, unfortunately unchanged. (New York should have seen the Bolshoi's Alexander Lapauri in this!) Among the other roles, Zakharova (great in her death scene), Zhelonkina, the beautiful Veronica Part, and the sweetly articulate Dumchenko were all impressive as Maria, while Zelensky, Fadeyev, Kuznetsov, and, to a lesser extent, Andrei G. Yakovlev, were stylish Polish lovers, and were all-too-soon polished off. But the ballet's outstanding performances came from Uliana Lopatkina (in a too-long delayed season debut) and Asylmuratova, both all flaring nostrils and passion, and perfectly superb as the spurned harem queen, Zarema.

These two Zaremas, together with Sylvie Guillem, whom I saw dance Zarema with the Kirov in London a few years back, were of Bolshoi-Plisetskaya dimensions, but elsewhere, in, say, the final Tatar dance (always the dance highlight of the Bolshoi production), this Kirov staging appeared unduly tame, although among the three dancers who led those Tatars as Nurali, the young Vasili Sherbakov deserves singling out as having the right savage stuff.

So what else was new? Oddly enough, George Balanchine. Right toward the end of the season the Kirov paid its respects to one of its greatest alumni. Balanchine had joined the Kirov company in 1921 but, frustrated in his choreographic hopes, he left Soviet Russia for good on July 4,1924. After a few wander-years in Paris and London, he came to the United States in 1934. Through all the decades of the Cold War, Soviet ballet and Balanchine seemed the chilliest of polar opposites, but time can change everything. Now, with Soviet ballet no longer even Soviet, the Kirov has proved eager to acquire the repertory of their prodigally gifted son.

It has danced Balanchine ballets in New York before, including, under its earlier Oleg Vinogradov regime, Theme and Variations and Scotch Symphony. This time with two all-Balanchine programs of standard works, it was almost laying down the gauntlet to Balanchine's own New York City Ballet, and claiming part of its heritage as its own.

What a contrast between Balanchine and the company's Soviet past. Remember that this season's period piece, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, was created on the Kirov company in 1934, the same year Balanchine created Serenade. How completely different, yet undoubtedly Balanchine was drawing on his own Maryinsky heritage. He had been much influenced by choreographers (who were eventually spurned for "formalism" by the Russians) such as Fyodor Lopukhov (particularly his 1923 Dance Symphony choreographed to Beethoven's Fourth, in which both the young Balanchine and the choreographer of Romeo and Juliet, Leonid Lavrovsky, appeared) and Kasyan Goleizovsky.

So is the Kirov as good in Balanchine as City Ballet? Yes, no, and not really. Different. Comparisons, as Shakespeare's Dogberry pointed out, are odious. However, it seemed to me that the Russians performed Serenade with just the right cantabile lilt--a blue thought in a blue shade--and both Lopatkina and Zakharova proved deliquescently lovely in the leading role, while Zelensky (well remembered for his years with City Ballet) is still among the finest exponents of Apollo in our time.

Among the others, Vishneva, partnered by a bouncy Samodurov, recalled the quicksilver magic of Violette Verdy in the Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux. In Symphony in C, although beautifully danced--particularly by Zakharova and her alternate, Part, in the Second Movement--the Kirov showed a tendency to chase the music rather than command it.

Just as The Sleeping Beauty also belongs to us in the West, so the Kirov has more than squatter's rights to Balanchine. He was a true son of Petipa and the Maryinsky, and showed it in every choreographic breath he took.

All in all, this was a superb season and one which has served to reestablish the Kirov in New York's eyes as one of the world's great dance companies. While the standard of the company, with its current emphasis on youth, is improving, it is still not, perhaps, the match of that wondrous Kirov Ballet of yesteryear which first appeared in Paris, London, and New York in 1961.