The first premiere of the 247th season was shown at the Bolshoi Theater

Strictly speaking, we have before us not a premiere, but the renewal of ballets that were on the playbill of the theater quite recently. The first ballet as a “pink” “Chopiniana” (tutu at the insistence of the director then made pink) was resumed in 2010, but did not last three years in the repertoire, and the second was staged by the current director Yuri Burlaka as an inauguration (that is, just before taking office as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet) in 2008, and disappeared from the poster in 2010, when the director left his post.

The ballet “Chopiniana” is included in the repertoire for a reason. This year, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sergei Diaghilev is widely celebrated, and together with other performances, it was with this ballet in 1909 that the great impresario opened his historic Russian Seasons in Paris, which, in fact, glorified the “Russian ballet” all over the world. and formed this brand now known to every cultured person in the minds of the public. And then, in 1909, all of Paris was plastered with posters of this ballet called La Sylphide (it still bears that name in the West), depicting the refined outline of the airy figure of Anna Pavlova by Valentin Serov, floating in an arabesque.

This first plotless ballet in history did not immediately become plotless. Influenced by the dances of Isadora Duncan’s “divine sandal”, the ballet master-reformer Mikhail Fokin also decided to present to the public a ballet to the music of Fryderyk Chopin. But in 1907, when the ballet to the music of Chopin orchestrated by Alexander Glazunov was first shown to the public at a charity concert, it did not resemble the current one in any way, and opened with the “Ball in Warsaw” scene. Further, characteristic scenes unfolded here, such as “A Peasant Wedding in a Polish Village”, “Night in Naples”, where the wife of the director of this ballet, Mikhail Fokine, Vera, danced a tarantella with great temperament against the backdrop of Vesuvius. But the main thing is that already immediately in the second scene the ballet showed the sick man saying goodbye to the life of Chopin, who was sitting at the piano surrounded by the ghosts of dead monks and the muse in developing white robes. The scene was set in a monastery and clearly alluded to the ballet scenes in the famous 19th-century opera Robert the Devil, which became one of the sources for the famous romantic ballet La Sylphide starring Maria Taglioni. And the most successful scene here turned out to be “Moon Vision”, which Anna Pavlova danced with Mikhail Obukhov.

The costume of Anna Pavlova in it was copied by Leon Bakst from an 1840s engraving depicting Maria Taglioni. Obukhov was wearing a velvet costume with a bow around his neck, which Bakst had created two years earlier for the ballet The Doll Fairy. It was this duet that became the basis of the second edition of this ballet, already plotless. This time in the “Romantic Dream” – “Ballet to the Music of Chopin” (namely, as the ballet was originally called) there was neither a monastery nor dead monks who came out of the coffins. Some romantic youth, perhaps a young Chopin, with the same “Chopin” bow, stood on the stage surrounded by corps de ballet dancers in white tunics, whose costumes were similar to those that Bakst made for Pavlova. The poses of the dancers resembled engravings of the romantic era, and instead of Obukhov’s “Waltz”, Anna Pavlova danced with the choreographer himself, who after a while, due to the fact that he did not have time to change clothes during the intermission (in the first act, Fokine danced in the ballet “Egyptian Nights”), replaced by Vaslav Nijinsky. It was then that the two greatest dancers of the 20th century for a short time formed a duet that subsequently conquered the Parisians, about which legends still tell.

As for the Bolshoi, the ballet Chopiniana was staged here for the first time in 1932. They did not attach much importance to it, instead of Benois’s scenery, which created a poetic setting for Fokine’s choreography and depicted the ruins of a monastery, they decorated it with random scenery from a selection. In 1946, when Galina Ulanova began to dance in the ballet, the scenery was changed. The backdrop of the artist Vladimir Dmitriev depicted a gloomy, darkened on the sides, as if in the “Sleeping Beauty”, an impenetrable thicket, a post-war park in Pavlovsk. This image, somewhat disharmonious with the enlightened purity of the ballet itself, was decided to be returned to the stage in the current version of the ballet (the revival artist Alona Pikalova). From Bakst’s bow on Chopin’s shirt, so that he does not look “vintage, and sometimes even comical”, costume designer Tatyana Noginova prudently refused.

The choreographers of the resumption were Vadim Gulyaev and Natalya Bolshakova, dancers of the Kirov (Mariinsky) Theater, and now teachers-tutors in the Ural Opera Ballet troupe. They were able to convey to Moscow dancers the subtleties of the St. Petersburg style of Chopiniana, a ballet born at the Mariinsky Theater 114 years ago.

The ballet on the Historical stage of the Bolshoi appeared romantically filled, weightless and airy. The soloists – Ekaterina Krysanova, Evgenia Obraztsova, Kristina Kretova – danced cleanly, without violating the neo-romantic style of this piece. And Artem Ovcharenko, who appeared as Chopin at the peak of his form, subtly interpreted the music of the ballet in his dance, without neglecting its nuances. His duet with Ekaterina Krysanova in The Seventh Waltz was filled with beauty and harmony. Semyon Chudin, who appeared in the part of Chopin in a different composition and also performed it perfectly, was prevented from reproducing a romantic image by a modern short, moreover, tousled hairdo. Recall that Nijinsky appeared in this game in a long-haired (almost shoulder-length) wig, with a gesture of his hand, as if in a vision of a romantic ideal, removing a lock of hair from his forehead. This gesture conveyed his desire for the highest spiritual beauty that he saw, which was personified by Anna Pavlova.

The grand classical pas from the ballet Paquita choreographed by Marius Petipa, shown in the second part, can be called completely opposite to the reformist aspirations of Mikhail Fokine of the period when he created his Chopiniana. The young choreographer considered the ballets of the old man Petipa as outdated. They were visited in the second half of the 19th century by officers who fell in love with ballerinas, as well as noble offspring of aristocratic families, and liberal-democratic circles of that time (including such significant Russian writers as Tolstoy, Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, etc.) were treated as empty and vulgar nonsense. Apparently for the contrast of the program, this is the Grand Pas and was pulled out of the storerooms of the Bolshoi Theater.

In general, Paquita is the very first ballet that Marius Petipa, who moved to Russia in 1847, transferred from Paris to St. Petersburg and danced in it as a soloist. True, the ballet was not an original work by Petipa; a year before that, another French choreographer, Mazilier, had set it to Deldevez’s music. When this ballet was reproduced on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater in St. Petersburg in 1847, there was no Grand Pas shown at the evening at the Bolshoi. It was created by Petipa much later, during the resumption of the ballet in 1882 to specially written music by Ludwig Minkus.

Completely “Paquita” was irretrievably lost after the revolution. Fragments of the ballet remained: a pas de trois from the first act (at the premiere it was excellently danced by Dmitry Smilevsky, Maria Mishina and Margarita Shrainer), two more fragments of the 2nd act, and the Grand Pas. These fragments from the “wedding” divertissement are known, they are now being played all over the world. And so often that everyone forgot that the ballet once also had a plot about an aristocrat kidnapped in childhood by gypsies, who, at the end of intricate plot twists, acquires her noble relatives and the right to become the wife of the French officer Lucien d’Hervilli, who is in love with her. By the way, her cousin, and named after the first performer Lucien Petipa, brother of Marius.

And although at the Paris Opera there is a wonderful performance by Pierre Lacotte, who completely restored this entire ballet (Yuri Smekalov did the same at the Mariinsky Theatre), Yuri Burlaka, the most authoritative connoisseur of ballet classics in our country, did not fantasize about the themes of ancient ballet. With his characteristic scrupulousness and pedantry, the choreographer put together at least some of the fragments that have survived from this ballet. These are not only dances, in which, according to tradition, students of the Moscow Academy of Choreography were engaged, but also Cotillion, which was not very effectively danced by the artists of the Bolshoi Theater. And with the weighty performance of the old Gavotte, which the actors of the Bolshoi Theater dance in crinolines, camisoles and powdered wigs, could only be tried on by such a wonderful artist as Maxim Surov, who, unfortunately, is now rarely seen on stage in poster parties. The action ended up being overly long and boring.

This almost hour-long performance was greatly lengthened by the numerous variations inserted here from various ballets. And in such quantities that only we like to equip this Grand Pas (Pierre Lacotte, for example, deprived his Parisian performance of these variations altogether). There are fourteen of them left (together with the male variation). At the evening at the Bolshoi Theater we stopped at seven, but even that turned out to be too much. Note that in the time of Petipa, after all, such a number of variations were not used: a maximum of four female variations. The last one was danced by Paquita herself, in the role of which not only Alena Kovaleva, who appeared in the first cast, but, surprisingly, Eleanor Sevenard, looked chic at the premiere. Male variations were not performed at all in those days. Not so today. Artem Ovcharenko, who danced with premier aplomb with Sevenard, became the main character of the Grand Pas scene. The party of Lucien d’Hervilli was also excellent for another prime minister of the Bolshoi, Yegor Gerashchenko, who became a reliable partner for Alena Kovaleva.

But even in the excellent performance of the Bolshoi artists, high art in such excessive and concentrated doses, from the Apollonian harmony that we saw in the first part, turned into an attraction, a trick with a fouette as a trick, and with a corps de ballet galloping like a cancan.