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Kirov's Le Corsaire Dazzles Paris: USSR's Kirov Mounts a Three-Act Version
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14580 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1988 |
2,132 Words |
| Author
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David Stevens
David Stevens is music critic for the International Herald
Tribune. |
It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the dance company most in evidence in Paris this season has been the Kirov Ballet of Leningrad, which came in force to the French capital for the third time in nine years. The Kirov brought about half of its total complement of 210 dancers and its own orchestra, and stayed for eight weeks in the 3,007-seat Palais de Congrès, giving fifty performances of repertoire that included six complete ballets and two different programs of excerpts. (In the whole of this season, the principal troupe of the Paris Opera Ballet is scheduled to give only a few more performances than that on its main stage.)
So much for statistics. But we are talking about the company that represents the continuation of one of the prime sources of tradition for ballet the world over--the Maryinsky of the Maurice Petipa, with and without Tchaikovsky, and the school shaped in this century by Vaganova; a tradition that has produced not only the Kirov's own artistic director (Oleg Vinogradov), but those of Moscow's Bolshoi (Yuri Grigorovich), the Paris Opera Ballet (Rudolf Nureyev), and the American Ballet Theatre (Mikhail Baryshnikov), not to mention, from an earlier era, George Balanchine. The names of Nureyev and Baryshnikov are reminders of how hard the Kirov was hit by defections in the 1960s and 1970s, and this third visit since Vinogradov took over in 1977 has offered a chance to evaluate the return to health of a troupe that was badly shaken and low in morale a decade ago. These are all factors in the magnetism that drew not only Paris ballet addicts, but an army of fans, critics, photographers, and groupies from all over Western Europe and North America.
Most Varied
There was also the repertoire, perhaps the most extensive and varied the Leningraders have ever brought to the West. The classics included Swan Lake, Chopiniana (Les Sylphides), and a dazzling season-closing series of Giselles. There were two relatively recent works by Vinogradov, The Battleship Potemkin and The Knight in the Tiger Skin, as well as a program of "contemporary" excerpts, the main novelty of which was the inclusion of a couple of pas de deux from ballets by Maurice Béjart. But the real novelty of the season was a classic from the Petipa era, the latest staging--dating from last April--of Le Corsaire, a ballet virtually unknown in the West in its complete version. The title is known outside the Soviet Union only because of the grand pas de deux frequently used as a showpiece on programs of gala lifts or as a bravura piece to win over juries in dance
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