Ludwig MINKUS (1826-1917)
La bayadère – ballet in three Acts (1877)
Choreography by Nacho Duato, after Marius Petipa
Nikiya – Angelina Vorontsova, Solor – Victor Lebedev, High brahmin – Sergey Strelkov, Rajah – Andrey Kasyanenko, Gamzatti – Andrea Laššáková, Bronze idol – Nikita Tchetverikov, Three shades – Svetlana Bednenko, Andrea Laššáková and Yulia Lukyanenko, First variation – Olga Arsenina
The Mikhailovsky Ballet
Orchestra of the Mikhailovsky Theatre/Pavel Sorokin
Directed for the screen by Andy Sommer
rec. Mikhailovsky Theatre, St Petersburg, November 2019
Video: 1 BD50 Full HD, 16:9
Audio: 2.0 PCM & 5.1 DTS HD Master Audio
Region: A / B / C
BELAIR CLASSIQUES BLU-RAY DISC BAC482 [110 mins]
Ludwig Minkus’s La bayadère is best known today because of The kingdom of the shades, a 30-minutes long sequence of Marius Petipa’s most sublime choreography that’s universally recognised as classical ballet’s finest “white Act”. Keen ballet-goers know, however, that La bayadère enjoys a wider significance - as the high point of a so-called Imperial Russian style of dancing that reigned supreme until Tchaikovsky’s radical innovations significantly changed the nature of music composed for the ballet and ultimately upturned the relationship between choreographers and composers (for more on this point, see my review of an earlier production of the ballet).
La bayadère exploited the fascination that India and the exotic lands of Asia exercised over Western minds in the 19th century. In much simplified form, its story tells of the temple dancer Nikiya who loves, and is loved by, the young general Solor. Unfortunately for the lovers, as a reward for Solor’s success in battle the rajah gives him the hand of his daughter Gamzatti and simultaneously orders the temple dancer’s death. Consumed by grief and guilt, Solor smokes opium and, in his drug-induced dream, meets Nikiya’s apparition in the ghostly kingdom of the shades. Utterly distraught as the effect of the drug wears off, he despairingly accepts that in reality he has lost her forever.
The first thing to note about this particular production is that it concludes the story at the end of Solor’s dream. It doesn’t, in other words, utilise Natalia Makarova’s recreation of the lost final Act in which Nikiya’s ghostly spirit rather spoils Solor and Gamzatti’s marriage ceremony by pulling down the whole temple on top of them, before being subsequently reunited with her remorseful – and, presumably, somewhat bruised – lover in the hereafter. While eschewing Makarova’s last Act is still common practice whenever La bayadère is staged by Russian companies or by a few others in the West, I personally regret the loss of both its concomitant emotional resolution and the guilty pleasure of enjoying an extra 20 minutes or so of John Lanchbery’s attractive recreation/reimagination of Minkus’s music.
Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato ended a three-year stint as head of St Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Ballet in 2014 but, given that his production of La bayadère premiered in October 2019, has presumably maintained harmoniously productive ties with it since then. According to the
Mikhailovsky Ballet’s own website, he “has created a production [of La bayadère] that harks back to Marius Petipa’s original, preserving the customary order of the scenes and the libretto’s climaxes, and leaving intact valuable pieces of the canonical choreography. At the same time, the ballet has freed itself of anachronisms and static pantomime episodes, replacing them with lavish, sculptural décor”.
That’s not a bad description – and if I’m at something of a loss to see how pantomime episodes communicating essential parts of the storyline can be replaced by mere sculptural décor of however lavish a degree, it’s probably best to charitably assume that the intended meaning’s been somewhat lost in translation. One of Duato’s innovations that’s not noted in that Mikhailovsky text, however, is the interesting enhancement of two of the ballet’s secondary roles. In the very opening scene, for instance, significant alterations are made to the portrayal of the high brahmin, a lascivious cleric with decidedly secular designs on Nikiya. While his role in other productions is generally confined to drooling over the girl, glowering with murderous rage at her indifference and wringing his hands in despair - all of which is accomplished without, to any great extent, moving around the stage - here he actually gets to dance, even if it’s not in a graceful style à la Petipa. Nevertheless, his choreography’s abrupt jerkiness, aided by a superbly tailored costume that swirls around him and visually exaggerates his movements, suits the narrative of his discombobulated emotions very well at that point. Meanwhile, the role of the rajah, in which the performer is usually required to do little more than look suitably imperious as he sups on delicate sweetmeats, enjoys the company of his nubile slave girls and plots murder most foul, is similarly expanded and developed. In this version, he gets to dance with both Gamzatti and the brahmin, on both occasions expressing in movement and gesture a menacing disposition that veers between intimidating gruffness and barely suppressed hints of violence.
While Duato introduces new choreography for those roles, in some other instances the aforementioned purge of what he, at least, regards as “anachronisms and static pantomime episodes” actually reduces the amount of dancing overall. Thus, the confrontation between love rivals Nikiya and Gamzatti and the later scene of the temple dancer’s death are both delivered notably more concisely in this version than elsewhere. The overall effect is to make this a comparatively fast-moving production, a phenomenon further exaggerated on this video presentation by editing that severely curtails the gaps between the curtain falling on one Act and rising for the next.
One of this performance’s real strengths lies in the quality of the performances of the members of the fatal love triangle. Dancing Nikiya, Angelina Vorontsova initially seems something of a cool blonde. Nonetheless, once we reach the point of her aggressive confrontation with her rival, Gamzatti, we can clearly see how she combines impressive technical precision with all the emotional and physical passion that the role requires. Meanwhile, that initially detached demeanour is actually restored to very effective use in The kingdom of the shades where she most beautifully portrays an otherworldly, emotionally-traumatised denizen of the afterlife. Her dancing throughout is very fine indeed. The same is true of Victor Lebedev who takes the role of Solor. He is a performer who may appear somewhat self-effacing when partnering Ms Vorontsova, but he really comes into his own in a series of energetically delivered solos of the highest technical quality, especially in The kingdom of the shades where some of his elevated leaps will occasionally make you gasp outright. The third member of the triumvirate, long-legged Slovakian ballerina Andrea Laššáková who takes the role of Gamzatti, is right up there with the other two. Bizarrely enough, having danced one of La bayadère’s starring roles in the story up to the point of Nikiya’s murder, she returns for no discernible reason whatsoever in the final scene as one of the three featured shades, though you have to dissect the cast list’s finer print in order to confirm that it’s really her.
I should also offer a brief nod to Nikita Tchetverikov who dances the role of the bronze idol. Though somewhat bizarrely forsaking the part’s usual heavily-applied gold body paint (think Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger), he delivers his flashy, crowd-pleasing solo with requisite aplomb. The corps de ballet, meanwhile, makes, as required, an effective body of courtiers, priests and priestesses, soldiers and, above all, spectral apparitions. Well-conceived lighting under what eventually becomes an attractively starry overnight sky helps ensure that The kingdom of the shades make its usual strong impact and the dancers’ blue costumes add effectively to the night-time atmosphere. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feeling a slight sense of disappointment in that, apart from those (including Ms Laššáková) taking featured roles, the company deployed only 24 ballerinas as the ghostly spirits of dead girls.
Because the impact made by the collective formation of the shades is so important at that point in the ballet, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the issue in a little more detail. Petipa himself boosted the visual impact by fielding the maximum number of corps de ballet dancers at that point. He habitually used 32, although on one particularly splendid occasion in 1900 he managed to get no less than 48 of them onto the stage, which must have created a glorious sight.
To be fair to Duato, 24 dancing shades is the number generally encountered in performance these days. Usually – as, for instance, in Royal Ballet performances - they’re arranged on stage in a block that’s six dancers wide by four rows deep. However, possibly in an attempt to create a grander spectacle for his audience, Duato deploys his 24 dancers across the stage in three rows, ranged one behind the other, of eight dancers each. When seen from the perspective of the theatre stalls, that eight-across-by-three-deep formation certainly looks impressive and its reduced depth is less obviously apparent. Nevertheless, with the choreography requiring the shades to move repeatedly en pointe in a massed block from the front of the stage towards the back and vice versa, the depth of the corps from front to back is actually just as important as its width across the front of the stage. Recognising the importance of both dimensions and not spreading your dancers too thinly is, it turns out, essential if the grand visual effect of the shades moving en masse as a single entity is to be successfully achieved. I’m sorry to report, therefore, that while the audience in the Mikhailovsky auditorium may have delighted in their view of the eight-dancers-wide formation, the all-seeing camera’s more elevated position is just as likely to draw the attention of us viewers at home to its simultaneous deficiency in depth.
Staying for just a moment more on the subject of The kingdom of the shades, I was also somewhat disappointed to find that the Mikhailovsky production brings its corps down onto the stage via a single and comparatively low-angled ramp. While there’s nothing really wrong with that as such, it undeniably misses an effective trick that’s best appreciated at the Bolshoi, where you’ll find no less than four descending ramps arranged in a zig-zag fashion. As the dancers descend them, they thereby criss-cross each other’s paths repeatedly and to fabulous visual effect. In spite of some neat camera work, the Mikhailovsky production seems, at that point, rather penny-plain in comparison.
In general, however, the sets designed for this production are very attractively designed and dressed by Angelina Atlagić. Her costume designs are also very pleasing and successfully convey a generic “oriental” feel with – as already noted in the case of the high brahmin - individualised touches that enhance particular performers’ appearances. Her success is enhanced by Brad Fields’s effective lighting which ensures that there’s always sufficient, yet interestingly varied, illumination to allow us to see everything we need.
The Orchestra of the Mikhailovsky Theatre – clearly composed of some of very fine players – delivers an idiomatic account of the score under the direction of the experienced Pavel Sorokin and it has been recorded in exemplary sound. Neither are there any issues with the quality of the filming. Screen director Andy Sommer’s judiciously-chosen mixture of shots ensures that we miss none of the important action, while his direction is subtly enough conceived so as not to draw undue attention to itself. Only in the opening scene do we find a single somewhat distracting episode. The centrepiece of its set is an open fire over which the various characters make their incantations to the gods. Its flames are usually depicted by stage trickery in the form of a few fluttering strips of red paper. Here, though, it almost appears as if the very-bright-to-the-point-of-visually-distracting flames are being generated by some sort of cinematic CGI (in which case, what are the members of the real-life St Petersburg theatre audience looking at?) or, possibly, a hologram. It’s undeniably weird, to the point that you sometimes find yourself looking at the fireplace rather than the dancers – and that can’t be right.
All in all, and after making allowance for my various reservations, I found this a very enjoyable account of La bayadère. I’d certainly suggest strongly that anyone new to Petipa/Minkus’s tragic masterpiece (its comedic equivalent is, of course, their Don Quixote) should make its first acquaintance via Natalia Makarova’s enhanced version (for various Royal Ballet productions: review, review & review, or else check out a La Scala performance that features superstars Svetlana Zakharova and Roberto Bolle on TDK DVD DVWW-BLLBSC).
Nevertheless, if you still wish to consider a version that omits Ms Makarova’s finale, this new one is a strong contender. It might, indeed, have become my top recommendation, had not the Bolshoi Ballet’s resources allowed it to mount a Kingdom of the shades so unrivalled in its sheer spectacle that it remains a required purchase for anyone wanting to experience a piece of ballet history in its most impressive form (BelAir Classiques Blu-ray BAC501).
It’s good, nonetheless, to welcome a new release from a dance company that until now hasn’t been as strongly represented in the market as it might have been. It is, therefore, with the greatest anticipation that I look forward to seeing more of its filmed productions – presented, I hope, in at least the same high quality as this one – in the months and years to come.
Rob Maynard
