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Now in its tenth anniversary year, Derek Deane’s Swan Lake is undoubtedly the best of his “in-the-round” staging (try as we might, who can forget Anastasia Volochkova vamping it up as Fairy Carabosse in his ill-advised Sleeping Beauty?) trusting and believing, as it does, in the long-tested values of Petipa and (especially) Ivanov. The “white acts”, for the choral architecture of their patternings, are particularly enchanting and the swelling mass of sixty harmonious and well-drilled swans becomes an illusion of depth and space. Converting from the proscenium to the oval stage, Deane has sought to invigorate Ivanov’s vision in terms of volume and symmetry, so that the swan dances are fixed at a central point in the midst of the stage (very often marked by the leading couple) from out of which he draws wheels, spokes, kaleidoscopic shapes that wind and arch and animate it. As the evening proceeds, the grandness of its scale keeps on increasing, until it reaches its climax at the fourth act, when the encircling swans become an anguished chorus whose torment at Siegfried’s betrayal pulsates like a beating heart. Of course there are also moments of brash vulgarity, designed to reach out to the very back of the upper galleries – a plethora of acrobats, jugglers, children in the first act; von Rothbart (arising with the aid of ENB’s beloved dry ice machine) making the kind of entrance many thought had disappeared since the death of Liberace – but they get tempered by the sheer size of the staging, in which big is best in dance, in feeling and manner.
 

It also helps that in each of its incarnations it has enjoyed the best of interpreters (Zakharova and Filin, Semionova and Bolle) and here, from New York and Stuttgart, come Sofiane Sylve and Friedemann Vogel (who is a laureate of the Erik Bruhn Competition). Sylve is a dancer of imperious technique, her pirouettes rise upwards with a kind of golden glow, fouettés are dashed off with hither-may-care bravura, yet she seems to do nothing more than prick the skin of the Swan Queen’s tragedy. Odile plays to her strengths and I admired the way she presents her as a mirage of Odette (“Look”, mimes von Rothbart, “do you remember this?”, as she unfolds into arabesque), but when Odette is only ever presented as a mirage we never reach the ballet’s complex soul. Take instead Vogel’s Siegfried who with his singing line and soaring leap cuts cleanly into its inner-drama. He galvanizes the huge space of the Albert Hall with a scandalously large grand jete, without ever sacrificing its lightness (I swear I never heard him land) and in the Act 1 solo with the cross-bow (the one to the music which Nureyev used) he stilled the auditorium, pouring out his movements with exquisite poetry. Here is the greatest of artists.

Special mention, also, to Maria Kochetkova who with these performances is marking her farewell to the company before moving to San Francisco as a Principal. Once again (in the Pas de Douze and the Neapolitan Dance) she reminds us of what we shall miss – effortless musicality, brightest attack, unbounded energy, total artistry. She crosses the Atlantic propelled by our applause and our cheers.