RUSSIAN BALLET

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22656, 10 March 1939, Page 7

RUSSIAN BALLET

SECOND PROGRAMME A TALENTED COMPANY The visit of so distinguished, so talented, and so thorough a company as the Covent Garden Russian Ballet now with us at the Theatre Royal, is certainly giving us the greatest pleasure, but it is a pleasure that brings with it some realisation of the greatness of our loss in not having the opportunity of seeing such artists interpret the Stravinsky ballets, the Debussy ballets, and the symphonic ballets. The reasonably near future we hope will remedy this for us. For the present it is a really'worth-while satisfaction that we are drawing from the very sensitive performances that the artists of the ballet are giving us. Last night the company gave their second programme, a programme which' they will repeat to-night, to-morrow night, and at the Saturday matinee. In this they present four ballets: Fokine’s “Scheherazade” (to Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic poem), his “Spectre de la Rose” (to Weber’s "Invitation a lh Valse”), the Tschaikowsky-Petipa ballet “Le Mariage d’Aurore,” and Lichine’s ballet to music by Handel, “Les Dieux Mendiants.”

The most spectacular ballet of the evening was the Choreographic drama. “Scheherazade” —a ballet in which the Bakst colourings (blues, greens, reds, golds, silvers, and bronzes), and the Fokine dramatisation and choreography give an indelibly dazzling impression of the fairy-tale East. This impression is an aural one, too, for the music of Rimsky-Korsakov (in this symphonic poem particularly) abounds in Eastern colour, and even though the ballet does not follow the composer’s original selection of incidents, both ballet and music-score derive from “The Thousand and One Nights.” The work of the orchestra, which is under the direction of M. Antal Dorati, was invariably satisfying, but nowhere throughout the evening more so than in this work, “Scheherazade,” where, in addition to their playing for the dancers, they played, and gave of it a forceful interpretation, too,( the lengthy and colourful introductory movement by way of prelude. This ballet is a riot of colour, emotion, and passion, and everything in last night’s performance brought this out to the fuff. The work of the corps-de-ballet was splendid, and that of the principals—Tamara Grigorieva as Zobeide, and Anton Dolin as the favourite slave, though not the savagest version that one has seen, was nevertheless in , every way just as tense and telling. The new ballet, “Les Dieux Mendiants,” with which the evening opened, is delightful, and admirably suited to the graceful Handelian music which accompanies it. A serving maid assisted by four negro servants prepares a fete champetre for a party of nobles, who enter dancing, and soon partake of the feast. A shepherd enters, and ladies seek to captivate him. He dances with them, but eventually seeks out the serving maid. The nobles are indignant, but at this moment a transformation takes place, and the shepherd and the serving maid reveal themselves as two divinities glorious to behold when their rags are discarded. Riabouchinska and Jasinsky are a delightful pair in the principal roles, and Tchinarova and Abricossova, too, play their parts as noblew°n}en with very great distinction. Of an entirely different nature is the request ballet (not mentioned on the printed programme), the romantic Spectre of the Rose,” one of the most perfect and most sensitive of all bal-. lets. This classical pas-de-deux portrays the dream of a young girl, returned from her first ball. The soul °? the rose she is wearing takes tangible shape and dances with her Tatiana Riabouchinska and Paul Petroff expressed to • perfection all that was intended by the Gautier poem which was the source of the inspiration of this exquisite gem among ballets. The vociferous applause which the work of these two artists received expressed something of the thanks which the audience wished to convey for the inclusion of this additional ballet in the Christchurch season. “Aurora’s Wedding,” the final ballet of the evening, possesses no actual plot, but it loses nothing through this, so great is its charm and variety and one is invariably glad that this ballet of an earlier period stiff lives on. It is this ballet which includes the famous “Blue-bird” dances, brilliantly performed on this occasion by Tatiana Riabouchinska and Anton Dolin. It includes the “Red Riding Hood and the Wolf” dance, given with delicious humour by Lisa Serova and Jan Hoyer. And it is here, too, that the “Three Ivans” appear—and energetic Ivans they certainly were last night— Lazovsky, Ladre and Matuchak—who appeared in these parts. There were also the delightful “Variations,” those solo dances that occur during the third number of this ballet. These were taken by five solo performers expressing markedly different characteristics (Edna Tresahar, Vera Nelidova, Anna Volkova, Galina 1 Razoumova, and for the fifth and chief “variation.” Irina Baronova). Then later on in this ballet come the charming trios “Florestan and his Sisters” (Boris Runanine, Kira .Abricossova and Tamara Tchinarova) and “The Porcelain Princesses” (Raissa Kouznetsova, Irina Wassilieva, and Eduard Borovansky). Something near perfection was surely reached in the beautiful final pas-de-deux between Princess Aurora (Irina Baronova) and Prince Charming (Paul Petroff). To mention all these details gives no ade-quate-idea of the whole, for all these dances, and several others for the corps-de-ballet, are set between the impressive opening Polonaise and the jubilant finale. It was a great ending to a great evening. (E.J.)