Get Out More .................................... Ballet Review

THE KIROV, GALA PERFORMANCE (Birmingham Hippodrome)

24-05-2008

One of the world's great ballet companies has been entertaining audiences in Birmingham this week, and Paula Elenor joins the throng.

A night at the ballet with the world class  Kirov company has rekindled my  love affair with St Petersburg  – their home town - surely one of the most beautiful and elegant cities in the world. 

Their Gala programme on Thursday night – a tribute to the company’s fine tradition and prominent role in the history of Classical Ballet – was also a thing of beauty and elegance. 

The Stirrer reviewed their full length ballet Jewels earlier in the week (see link here).   In a way the Gala provided us with a context by which to judge their fully length works, a show case for the virtuoso talents of their brilliant soloists and a taster for things to come:  Don Quixote (Saturday at the Hipp). This full length ballet was choreographed by the prolific Marius Petipa  (157 productions to his name!) who made his name in Imperial Russia in the late 19th century – the heyday of Russian Classical ballet. 

The Principal dancers of Don Quixote, Olyessa Novikova and Mikhail Lobukhin,  truly earned their cheers from the audience on Thursday night with a spirited and technically faultless Grand pas de Deux from the show – get your tickets for it now!

My personal favourite from the Divertissments section of the programme was the The Grand Pas Classique danced with exquisite elegance by Viktoria Tereshkina and Leonid Sarafanov.

However, it was the Company’s performance of Kingdom of the Shades ( Act 3 of La Bayadere)  which really excited me – epitomising the essence of Petipa’s extravagant staging.

The beginning of the piece was quite stunning as one by one the ballerinas made their entrance from the darkness to create a seemingly endless procession of divine beings  moving as one.  (I did wonder if they were cheating at one point by using CGI) And it got even better as Ekaterina Kondaurova and Evgeny Ivanchenko moved the piece gently forward to its emotional conclusion.

If you wanted classical ballet with a contemporary twist – you’d have been disappointed.

However, you certainly did get a strong sense of Kirov’s artistic tradition evolving from late 18th French influences, through the Imperial Romantic period to the equally influential developments of the Soviet period. Each of the pieces was staged and costumed giving us a real sense of their historical and cultural context.  

Yes, it was a bit old-fashioned, but it was lovely!  And, yes, I am resolved to revisit St Petersburg (it was Leningrad when I was there!)!  So, all in all, Kirov’s visit has been a marvellous opportunity to forge even stronger relations between our city and theirs.

The visit of the Kirov Ballet company to the Hippodrome underlines the success of the wonderful International Dance Festival which has bought such an amazing diversity of dance culture to Birmingham.   I no longer gripe about Liverpool getting the European City of Culture.   We don’t need it any way – we are an International City of Culture!

See more about the International Dance Festival at www.idfb.co.uk

And to book tickets for the Kirov go to www.birminghamhippodrome.com

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