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Shostakovich on Stage
Maryinsky Ballet
London Coliseum
25 to 29 July

by John Percival
copyright ©2006 by John Percival

Just imagine: a cast of 95 performers, no less, taking their calls after a Maryinsky Ballet premiere at the London Coliseum, led by a dancer who joined the company from the Vaganova School in 1957 (yes, that is 49 years ago). There was a solitary boo for the choreographer from some nitwit, but altogether a very warm audience response. We are talking of “The Golden Age”, one of two ballet programmes brought to celebrate the centenary of the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, together with three operas. You may remember that the opera and ballet companies from St Petersburg were announced for Covent Garden this summer, but the Maryinsky’s artistic director Valery Gergiev fell out with their impresario because he wanted to pay homage to Shostakovich and refused their request for the likes of “Swan Lake”. Good for him — and good that he could find the alternative theatre and enough sponsors to make it possible.

The ballet company’s first programme was a mixed bill of three works all first staged in 1961-62, but among them only Igor Belsky’s “Leningrad Symphony” has been fully seen here before. Its abstract evocation of the courage of Leningrad’s citizens under German siege really needs much more passion and heroic conviction in performance than the present cast provides (Igor Kolb and Uliana Lopatkina in the leads); our historic imagination has to work hard to believe what a strong creation it used to look.

The most successful revival is of Konstantin Boyarsky’s “The Young Lady and the Hooligan”, originally created at the Maly Theatre, where Valery Panov’s vivid performance as second cast for the premiere won him the coveted transfer to what was then called the Kirov. Panov, incidentally, much later gave an extract from it when appearing as guest with London Festival Ballet. Now it is Igor Zelensky whose playing of the rough lay-about proves vivid, physically exciting, amusing and emotionally compelling as he succumbs to the smiling charm of Svetlana Ivanova as the innocent but eager young lady. Hooligan or not, the man who did not adore her would be a fool. (Diana Vishneva had been announced to make her debut in that role but was then reported as indisposed; I cannot believe she would have been as well suited as the lovely Ivanova). Zelensky achieves not only power in his more demanding solos but an unexpectedly fast, light, tripping quality, and his facial expressions convey real feeling. The ensemble of toughs and trashy layabouts who kill the hero in the end might have been more sharply defined, but the ballet still works. The plot is based on a film by the illustrious writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Mayakovsky himself is the central character in the evening’s other ballet, “The Bedbug”.

The first version of this starred the young Natalia Makarova, who loved doing something so different from her other roles, but the choreographer Leonid Jakobson later reworked it to different music. Maybe Russian audiences would be familiar with Mayakovsky’s play of the same title; without that, we westerners are heartily puzzled by the enigmatic plot. Before seeing it a second time I read a summary of the play and am not much the wiser; I guess Jakobson departed quite a bit from his model. For instance, lively little Andrey Ivanov as the comic anti-hero Prisypkin is shown as insect-like at the beginning instead of the end. However, Nikolay Naumov reveals suave charm as the author directing his highly varied characters around, and the long-legged Ekaterina Osmolkina and suave Yana Selina are fine as Prisypkin’s main lady-loves. The outcome is colourful, lively, often naughty, and even if unintelligible it is far from boring.

All three works on the mixed bill (like so many other Shostakovich ballets by such as Massine, Cranko, MacMillan, Béjart, Panov and Morris) use music written for other purposes, but the new “Golden Age” restores the first of the scores Shostakovich wrote specially for ballet — the others were “Bolt” and “The Bright Stream”, staged 1931 and 1935, both by Lopokov. Both of these, like the 1930 “Golden Age” by Kaplan and Vainonen, disappeared after being attacked on ideological grounds: how Soviet ballet suffered from politicians!

None other than Galina Ulanova, who danced the lead in it, told me that the first “Golden Age” was actually rather good, but obviously there could be no possibility of reviving it now, and the one well-known staging since then, Grigorovich’s in 1982 for the Bolshoi, not only invented a rather silly new plot but took considerable liberties with the music. The new Maryinsky version introduces a choreographer new to me, Noah Gelber: born and trained in New York, he danced in America, Belgium etc before joining Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, and first went to Petersburg supervising their Forsythe repertoire. To his surprise he was asked to choreograph a one-act ballet at the Maryinsky, “The Overcoat”, his first with a story, the success of which apparently led to their calling on him for “Golden Age” when others had fallen through. Note that he had just two months to devise and produce a three-act ballet from scratch (and wasn’t helped when Gergiev cancelled the dress rehearsal in favour of a concert conducted by himself). The Maryinsky premiere was on 28 June, and by rearranging the London schedule he was given one day here to polish it.

The plot pays homage to the 1930 premiere by including a Soviet football team who travel to a west European tournament, but we actually start in 2000 with a white-haired school teacher showing her pupils some old photographs. This is the heroine, Sophie, grown old, and by chance a visiting group includes an elderly man who recognises her and produces from his pocket a photo of them taken 70 years earlier and lovingly preserved. Each had thought the other dead, but now they remember …

We jump back to 1930, when the young Alexander and his chum Vladimir have arrived with their football team. Naturally it isn’t long before Sophie and Alexander are attracted, in spite of having no language in common, while a local film star falls for good-looking Vladimir. We see Sophie quarrel with her rich fiancé and her father, the Mayor, and try to treat Alexander when he is injured. Old Sophie meanwhile is so affected by her memories that she faints and has to be investigated in hospital. The big surprising novelty comes in Act 3 which shows what happened to the young principals during World War Two: she seems at risk of a concentration camp; he is captured and would have been shot with others if Vladimir, himself injured and dying, had not rescued him.

All this is filled out with parties, dances, a couple of cabarets, and of course the football matches where the men do not imitate the game (thank goodness) but suggest it through the animation and adversity of their virtuoso group dances. Two things I especially admired about Gelber’s staging — developed in conjunction with young theatre director Andrey Prikotyenko — are the skill with which he organises many large and varied ensembles, and the clarity with which he tells a somewhat complex story. He cleverly deploys the large stage props, including a ramp of benches in the stadium, and a giant, almost stage-filling, old-fashioned camera designed by Zinovy Margolin, who had, I’m told, been chosen before Gelber was brought in and insisted on sustaining his own concept.

Among the many solo dancers, let me mention Ekaterina Kondaurova as the glamorous film star, Islom Baimuradov stalwart as Vladimir, Andrey Ivanov as the agitated little host Mr. von Klein, and gigantic Viacheslav Khomiakov as the Soviet team captain. Irina Golub danced young Sophie in Petersburg but was since injured and Daria Pavlenko (named anyway for a later cast) therefore stepped in for London, proving a beautiful and sweet-natured heroine. Mikhail Lobukhin, playing young Alexander, graduated only in 2002 but showed a strong presence and technique to complement his tough, fair-haired good looks, explaining why he has quickly been given several classic leads. The golden oldies were Gabriela Komleva and Sergey Berezhnoi, who graduated 1957 and 1967 respectively, are well remembered here as fine principal dancers; now on the ballet staff as coaches, they proved to have lost nothing of their stagecraft or authority — two commanding and expressive performances.

And here’s another surprise at the very end. The curtain falls on old Sophie and Alexander clearly resolved to continue their re-acquaintance; but the conductor (Tugan Sokhiev) raises his baton and the music continues. The curtain rises once more to show a huge photograph of the smiling, bespectacled young (20-ish?) Shostakovich probably about the time he wrote “The Golden Age”, so that we admire and remember him through this musical epilogue. A true and deserved homage.

Photos:
Front page: Scene from Leningrad Symphony Daria Pavlenko (The Girl). Foto by Natasha Razina © State academic Mariinsky theatre
Scene from Leningrad Symphony Foto by Natasha Razina © State academic Mariinsky theatre
Scene from The Young Lady and The Hooligan Ilya Kuznetsov (The Hooligan) Foto by Natasha Razina © State academic Mariinsky theatre

Volume 4, No. 29
July 31, 2006
copyright ©2006 John Percival
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