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What delicate negotiations found Joseph Mazilier’s Parisian success Le Corsaire transported to Russia we shall perhaps never know, but with Alexei Ratmansky’s immaculate staging we are closer than ever before to seeing its Parisian tastes directly through the Imperial Russian lens. The costumes (by Yelena Zaytseva) meticulous re-create those designed in 1899 by Yevgeny Ponomarev (the sketches of which are held at the Theatre Library in St Petersburg) and reveal the harmony of colour, the strictest of detail to which Ponomarev adhered, and the extravagant tastes required to delight the Imperial court. Yet amidst these ornate fashions, Ponomarev also created dresses of exquisite simplicity. The Jardin Animé sequence can often seem an over-elaborate display of “pretty-pretty” - the recent production in Munich featured a splurge of pinks and pastels which in retrospect appeared fussy and, at points, vulgar. Yet here, Ponomarev (via Zaytseva) pares down colour to its absolute minimum: white dresses and a string of pearls offset only by the cluster of pink flowers at their breasts and (as in Canova’s sculpture) in their hair. Colour itself is provided by the baskets and garlands of pink roses that dancers hold aloft, swinging from side-to-side as if by a breeze wafting through the air.

Flowers thread through this production like trailing blossom. Medora first throws a bunch down to Conrad in the opening moments, and it is a white rose which proves his un-doing at the hands of his rival, Birbanto, at the first act’s end. Act 2 opens with six girls entering en diagonale white flowers bunched in their hair, followed by another six with pink ones. But it is of course the Jardin Animé in which the orgy of flowers makes its most dazzling appearance. In its myriad patternings, in its entwining arches and groves, has the scene ever looked so bushy? In her opening variation in the sequence’s Entrée Medora stands at the centre of a “V” formation in attitude balance. Recalling Aurora’s “Rose Adagio” she accepts a single rose from each of her attendants and we watch this youthful slave become imperial bride. When shown in Munich, I thought that the sequence recalled the frescoes of Flora and her Naiads that adorned the ceiling of the Wittelsbach’s summer residence at Nymphenburg, presenting, in allegorical terms, a vision of absolute rule. From a Moscow in post-Soviet times, this vision of Imperial absolute rule is potent even more. Here the scene looks out from the wintry Russian palaces to le Notre’s gardens at Versailles (or Josephine’s at Malmaison) and exemplifies the Imperial fascination which had become the phenomenon, “France in Russia”.
 

It seems impossible to think that the company which was dancing Spartacus last week is that which is dancing with such classical ease this week. Lunkina was her usual divine and softly graceful self, but I think she was outshone by the Gulnare of Anastasia Yatsenko, of whom I am becoming quite a fan, whose luscious phrasing and nuanced comic detail made it an impeccable performance. I adore Sergei Filin and admire the boldness of his manner, his strength, his charm, his absolute attention to his partner. There are moments in mime sequences in which I find the dancers (Loparevich as the Pasha, Petukhov and Simachev as the Eunuchs) are beginning to over-egg the pudding, certainly more so than the opening night, and to this end they need to watch the marvel that is Gennadi Yanin whose Lankedem is created a character by the simplest of gestures. Also to Merkuriev praise for his swagger and his piratical ways and a young dancer, Andrei Bolotin, who in the Pas d’ Esclaves revealed a lovely, clean, classical technique. I think the orchestra may have had one too many vodkas the night before.