Ring of truth
Watching American Ballet Theatre's hugely enjoyable new production of Le Corsaire at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, it was difficult to believe this was the same company we saw at the Lon- don Coliseum eight years ago. Brilliant performances in a sparkling production now contrast with our memory of a compa- ny then at a low ebb, its repertory and dancing, except for a couple of works by Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp, looking really bedraggled.
A financial crisis, had made things even worse by 1992, when a new artistic director, former leading dancer Kevin McKenzie, was appointed with a brief to get results within two years or face closure. Happily, he and a new executive director, Michael Kaiser, have turned everything round with an imaginative panache our own companies should envy (and would do well to copy). McKenzie seems to have his pick of Ameri- can and international dancers, and has boldly renewed their programmes. Le Cor- saire is the latest of no fewer than five new full-evening productions Ballet Theatre has mounted in the last two years, besides one- act ballets given both at the Met and in additional seasons at City Center.
No point in reading up on Byron's once widely popular poem 'The Corsair' as preparation for the ballet it inspired. Not much remains from it except the names of the characters, and maybe some of the swashbuckling action, the colourfully voluptuous setting and the humour that bubbles up at intervals. The ballet began life in Paris in 1856; Napoleon III and his Empress extravagantly praised the pre- miere, and it reached London that same year. But such big ballets were just going out of fashion, so after a burst of populari- ty Le Corsaire vanished in the West and (like Giselle) survived only because it was mounted in Russia. Marius Petipa danced the title part in St Petersburg and he both preserved and elaborated the ballet when he became director of the Imperial Ballet.
Modem audiences in the West knew nothing of Le Corsaire until Nureyev intro- duced extracts from it in the 1960s; the full ballet had to wait until 1987/8 for the Kirov Ballet to bring a new production by Piotr Gusev and Yuri Slonimsky to Paris and London. Real ballet-lovers succumbed to it at once. Who cared that the story — of beautiful girls captured by a slave-dealer, the decrepit Pasha who buys them, and pirates who rescue them — was wildly over the top? What it provided was a tremen- dous series of dazzling solos, some heroic, comic or seductive characterisation, and a spectacular stage effect in the traditional and always thrilling shipwreck.
Ballet Theatre's production goes back to a slightly earlier Kirov version by Kon- stantin Sergeyev, and was mounted by the Canadian dancer-director Anna-Marie Holmes with help from a whole constella- tion of former Kirov stars, above all, Sergeyev's ballerina wife Natalia Dudin- skaya. The latter had learned the leading role from the great teacher Agrippina Vaganova, who herself learned it from 'These are guaranteed for twelve sermons or six midnight vigils.' Petipa. No wonder there is a ring of truth about all those wonderful solos for the heroine Medora, her fellow-captive Gulnare, and the three gorgeous Odal- isques who are also among the slave-dealer Lankedem's wares.
Ballet Theatre's version has even more solos than the Kirov one, both for the women (including an extra character, the Pasha'a favourite Sultana) and for the lead- ing men, whose virtuoso numbers were added or developed in this century by Sergeyev and other Soviet male dancers. The order of scenes is different, Ballet Theatre's being nearer to the historical ori- gins, especially in leaving the shipwreck until the end instead of starting with it. More important, Ballet Theatre do not apply such an ironic approach to the play- ing as the Kirov; on the other hand, the relationships between the characters are• less developed, so there are arguments for both treatments.
In the end, though, Le Corsaire stands or falls by the quality of its dancing and here I think the result is a tie between the Ameri- cans and the Russians. Except for Anna- Marie Holmes's own Boston Ballet, who performed it last year with reportedly great success, Ballet Theatre is the first Western company to dance Le Corsaire in this cen- tury, and they go at it with enormous exhil- aration.
In four successive performances I caught either three or four different dancers in each of the leading parts, and that was still not the full roster. On the whole, I would say the Kirov women have the edge over Ballet Theatre's mainly for charm and style: there was certainly no fault to find with the technique or presentation of Ballet Theatre's ballerinas, and both Julie Kent's Medora and Paloma Herrera's Gulnare are right up among the best.
Among Ballet Theatre's men, I would give pride of place to Vladimir Malakhov for the mixture of power and lightness in his dancing and the wry humour of his act- ing as Lankendem. But in Jose Manuel Carrerio, Angel Corella, Giuseppe Picone and Ethan Stiefel the company has a stag- gering group of young virtuosi, with several others competing not far behind. Indeed, my only complaint would be that some- times they seem to work too hard at aston- ishing their audience by the sheer brilliance of their steps at the expense of musical flu- ency or drama.
For sheer theatricality I was more impressed by the whole-hearted conviction which John Selya, a corps de ballet mem- ber, brings to the role of Birbanto — one example of the company's strength in depth, for which I could also cite the junior-ranking women who dance the Odalisques so well, especially Gillian Mur- phy with her amazingly smooth, effortless triple and quadruple pirouettes. She hails, I read, from Wimbledon; how did we come to lose her?
Previous page
