Metropolitan Opera House

[Edward]

Bolshoi Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House:
http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/bolshoi.aspx

[Edward]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/21/arts/dance/21svet.html
July 21, 2005
A Young Ballerina Learns to Walk Through Open Doors
By GIA KOURLAS

When Svetlana Zakharova was 10, her mother took her to an audition at a Kiev ballet school. Ms. Zakharova wanted none of it. She had no taste for ballet, positive or negative; her dread had more to do with the prospect of leaving her family, who lived in Lutsk, a town in western Ukraine.

"I remember that there were so many kids; they were all nervous and so were their parents," she recalled through an interpreter at the Metropolitan Opera House. "I said to my mom: 'I don't want to live in a dormitory; I want to live with my family. That's why even if they will accept me in the school, I won't be studying here.' My mom said, 'Just try to get through the competition first.' "

By the time Ms. Zakharova reached the final round, she fell in love, if not with ballet itself, then at least with the idea of what it might be like to be a ballerina. "There were girls and boys who were already students there, and they were so beautiful," she said. "I decided that I really liked it very much. Finally, when I was accepted, my mom asked me, 'So would you stay and study there?' I told her, 'Yes!' "

Ms. Zakharova, now 26 and a principal dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, which is based in Moscow, is a remarkable onstage force. For the company's engagement tonight at the Metropolitan Opera House, she will perform Kitri in "Don Quixote" opposite Andrei Uvarov - one of her favorite partners - and Aspicia in "The Pharaoh's Daughter" with Nikolai Tsiskaridze next Thursday and Saturday evenings.

For seven years, Ms. Zakharova was the brilliant young face of the Kirov Ballet, in St. Petersburg, where she spent one year in the corps before being promoted to principal dancer; in 2003, she surprised the dance world by defecting to the Bolshoi. "Maybe I just wanted to change many things in my life," she explained. "It was very difficult for me to leave the Maryinsky. I grew up there. But kids, at a certain point, have to leave their families, build their own home and find their own views."

Naturally supple, with long legs and a luxurious line, Ms. Zakharova possesses the kind of onstage beauty that practically leaves you woozy. With waist-length dark hair framing an alabaster face, she's just as radiant in person, but she's also a bit of a clown. After a photographer reminded her to stand up straight, she giggled and slumped to a grotesque extreme, eerily resembling a drawing by the artist and balletomane Edward Gorey, who might have used one of his favorite words to describe her - "zippy."

Ms. Zakharov began her training with Valeria Sulegina in Kiev. "We worked all the time," Ms. Zakharova recalled. "At 13, 14 - when all you want to do is go outside to play - she was holding us down. We were all terrified by her, but we all loved her." When Ms. Zakharova turned 15, she entered the Vaganova Prix young dancers competition in St. Petersburg and was awarded second prize. Afterward, she was invited to continue her training at the Vaganova Academy, where she remained for a year before joining the Kirov.

"Right away, I started working with a great coach, Olga Moiseyeva," she said. "Now, at the Bolshoi Theater, I work with Lyudmila Semenyaka. They are very much alike. They both pay attention to an actor's ability and talent, not only technique."

Ms. Zakharova first met Ms. Semenyaka, who also danced first with the Kirov and then the Bolshoi, by chance; she needed a coach for a guest appearance in Moscow. Ever since, Ms. Semenyaka has taught Ms. Zakharova much, including how to fill the Bolshoi stage, which is much larger than what she was used to. "During rehearsals, she teaches me not to dance just for the mirror in front of me," Ms. Zakharova explained, "but where to look at each moment."

For all her innate ability, however, Ms. Zakharova has been criticized for doing too much; while her footwork is bracingly sharp, she is so flexible that when she unfolds her leg in a fluid extension to the side, she has been known to graze her ear. Yet Ms. Zakharova is not a vulgar dancer; there's something instinctively casual, even naïve about her performance style.

"People reject things that are new, especially in the ballet," she said. "Standards of beauty change through the ages. I try to push it out of my mind. Why should ballet be as it was 20 years ago? Of course you can lift your leg, but you can also put it up very, very beautifully. As people like to say in ballet jargon, 'make it tasty.' "

If, as critics and fans have remarked, she has undergone a transformation - she calls it her "Bolshoi transition" - Ms. Zakharova credits it to a fresh sense of abandon in her movement. "I think that I feel more free," she said. "In the Maryinsky Theater, for some reason, it is decided that there is this sort of canon, that there are these rules. It should only be that way, but sometimes that way doesn't look so good anymore. Dancing in Moscow gives me more possibilities."

She also finds that the pace of Moscow, where she lives with her retired parents and older brother, is more suited to her personality. "Everything happens in every moment, starting with the productions I dance and ending with the friends I have made," she said. "And all those things together are very precious to me."

She has a boyfriend, who is Russian, not a dancer and, she adds with a laugh, "never will be." But it has never been Ms. Zakharova's style to socialize with dancers outside of the theater. "It's very rare in the ballet world when you have close relations," she said. "They say that ballet people do" - she makes quotation marks with her hands - " 'love' each other."

Ms. Zakharova has learned that in ballet, success is connected to power. "A very important moment in my professional career came when I was invited to the Paris Opera," she said. "I was 21 or 22. It is now my fourth season performing there. That was the moment when I became a world star. I became independent. It was like my name, my brand. Now, if I don't like something, I can reject it. I can choose a partner with whom I want to dance, I can choose the repertory. So this is like growing up inside myself and growing up with my parts as well."

In looking back at her career, she also knows that she owes much to Igor Zelensky, the Russian dancer who was her main partner at the Kirov; even when he was already a star, he invited her to dance with him at gala showcases. "Maybe thanks to him, the world found out about me, too," she said. "He opened a little window. Because when I got to Paris, the door was open."

[Edward]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/20/arts/dance/20don.html
July 20, 2005
Bolshoi Opens, Riding a Tried and True 'Quixote'
By JOHN ROCKWELL

Like some mighty machine, clanking and groaning, the Bolshoi Ballet lumbered into the Metropolitan Opera House on Monday night, its first visit in 18 years to the home it used to haunt, at the old Met and the new, from 1959 through the 1970's.

With 130 dancers (out of 220 at home in Moscow), a good-size orchestra and the usual gaggle of administrators and technicians, this two-week visit represents a considerable investment by the Met - an investment of money and of faith in the still-potent power of the Bolshoi brand name.

The Kirov Ballet (along with its Opera) in St. Petersburg has rather eclipsed the Bolshoi in recent years. But the name Bolshoi still means something special to American ballet lovers who remember its glory years, and all those ballets with muscular leaping men and commanding, dazzling ballerinas.

That image owed something to the stability of the Soviet system and Soviet subsidies, and to the 31-year reign of Yuri Grigorovich as director. Mr. Grigorovich's signature ballet was "Spartacus," the story of a slave revolt that fit perfectly into Soviet ideology and showcased the manly virtuosity of the old-style Bolshoi male dancer. As it happens, "Spartacus" comes up Friday as the second ballet in this Met season, and we shall see how the company does it today.

The repertory next week features rarities: a newly choreographed version of "The Bright Stream," suppressed in 1935 but boasting a full-length score by Shostakovich, and "The Pharaoh's Daughter," Petipa's first full-length ballet, now reconstructed. Aleksei Ratmansky, who leads the company after an unsettled period, did the "Bright Stream" choreography.

But for Monday's opener, the Bolshoi and the Met settled on the tried and true. "Don Quixote" is having quite a run this season because of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first part of Cervantes's novel. Last month Suzanne Farrell reconstructed Balanchine's 1965 version in Washington, and American Ballet Theater opened its own Met season just eight short weeks ago with basically the same Petipa-plus version the Bolshoi dances.

One says Petipa-plus because while Petipa first choreographed it in 1869, to Minkus's transcendently cheesy music, and then revised it, it was Aleksandr Gorsky who in 1900 set it in the form we know it today. It steadily evolved during the Soviet era, with all manner of more or less well-advised accretions, and has been steadily popular in Russia, having been danced by the Bolshoi nearly 1,000 times. In the West, it took versions by those Soviet emigrants Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov to establish the Petipa-Gorsky version here.

The ballet is a charming Mediterranean romp, a comic adventure in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are largely reduced to observing some flashy dancing and the formulaic love affair of the spirited Kitri and the dashing Basil. If the Bolshoi company is a kind of machine, so is this ballet: Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times has referred to it as a "machine for dancing."

The Bolshoi uses a version of the ballet from 1999 by Aleksei Fadeechev, himself a former artistic director for a short while. The Fadeechev "Don Quixote" is longer than Ballet Theater's version, with more mime and character dancing. It uses rather wan sets and lavish if glitzy costumes based on 1906 originals. It was seen at the Kennedy Center in 2000 but didn't make it to New York for the Bolshoi's short season at the New York State Theater under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Festival.

There will be ample time in the next two weeks to take the measure of the Bolshoi Ballet today. Each of the four ballets will have three casts, and everyone is likely to relax from the pressures of a rapid setup at the Met (Ballet Theater gave its final "Giselle" Saturday night) and opening-night nerves.

That said, Monday's performance was pretty charmless and pretty ragged. Dancers charged out, fixed smiles on their faces, blasted their way through the choreography with a kind of slam-bang effort, and ended with a forced flourish to elicit applause. Of seductive Spanish charm, there was precious little; in that regard, Ballet Theater's "Don Quixote" was the clear winner. The performance I saw had Diana Vishneva, the Kirov star, as Kitri. The Kitri on Monday was Svetlana Zakharova, herself a former Kirov ballerina and now the seeming star of the Bolshoi. Tall and thin and leggy, she whipped through her steps and extensions and leaps and lifts with hard-working determination, but that was about it.

Only in the big pas de deux in the third act did she and her partner, Andrey Uvarov, begin to come into their own. His variations had an elegant stylishness, although nothing to make one forget Ballet Theater's men, and their lifts together were nicely done.

Everyone seemed a bit more relaxed in the third act, and there were noteworthy bits of dancing throughout. Anna Antonicheva proved herself an elegant classical dancer as Queen of the Dryads. (The dream sequence in Act II is the purest Petipa in the ballet.) Alexander Petukhov was a sweetly funny Sancho Panza, more Russian than Spanish. The spectral Alexey Loparevich mimed the Don. Natalia Osipova sparkled in her short variation in the third-act grand pas. Timofey Lavrenyuk made a dashing toreador, sinuously partnered by Maria Allah. Anna Antropova was a striking Gypsy and Nina Kaptsova a cute, Sarah Lane-like Cupid.

Importing the Bolshoi orchestra may well prove rewarding down the line. Here, under the direction of Pavel Klinichev and with Minkus's tired music, the musicians didn't rise to the occasion. The playing was full-bodied, but sloppy and unfinished. Rather like much of the dancing.

The Bolshoi Ballet performs through July 30 at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000. "Don Quixote" continues through tomorrow.

[Edward]

I saw the Bolshoi performance "The Bright Stream" with a score by Shostakovich. The ballet was a comedy, from 1935, banned by Stalin. It was funny and delightfull, ballerinas were young, beatiful and danced like goddesses.

[Edward]

The season starts September 19th

http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/calendar.aspx?monthyear=9-2005