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April 19m:

Serenade

As always, Ekatarina Osmolkina's dancing was a delight, and she treated the Waltz Girl with the same delicate touch she'd shown in Chopiniana or even Paquita. Osmolkina flew on waves of blue cotton-candy, a wonder of effortless, magical ballon. Osmolkina's employment of her technique is so retiring, so self-effacing, it's easy to underestimate the power she has at the tips of her fingers and toes, easy until you realize just how high she floats in her big jetés, and how far; or she's just finished a series of picture-perfect pirouettes. Add these to her exemplary port-de-bras — light, perfectly shaped, yet always breathing with inner life — and her beautiful clear face, the scroll on which she writes her stories with disarming legibility, and you've got the makings of a first-rate, unforgettable Waltz Girl. Wonderful makings, but, alas, not the creation. More than any other artist of the Kirov, Osmolkina's absorbed all the precepts of the Kirov's dry perfection, and has made this Zen garden flower.

She brings the Kirov style to radiant life from within, so differently from Tereshkina's brilliantly underplayed bravura or Lopatkina's icy and sometimes ostentatious perfection. Perhaps some day she'll similarly the beating heart of Serenade, and it could well be a performance for the ages, but she's not there yet. There were many pleasures in observing her Waltz Girl, but as Balanchine often exhorted his dancers, I wanted more. She put her excellences in the service of a pretty, conventional tale of "Girl meets boy; girl loses boy." She was beautiful throughout, but I wanted her to astonish me, as she did when I first saw her, beginning her "celeste" solo with tender paces and shifts of her gaze about the stage, as if the notes of the celeste were a cloud of butterflies about her face which only she could see. I missed that magic in Serenade, a ballet that should always enthrall.

Osmolkina was ably partnered in the Waltz by Yevgeny Ivanchenko, a powerfully attentive partner who sometimes seems a bit at sea when required to evoke poetry without the aid of a ballerina (as in his uneven Chopiniana). I cannot say enough good things about Ekaterina Kondaurova's Dark Angel or Nadezhda Gonchar's Russian Girl, although for entirely different reasons. Kondaurova's Dark Angel, her Waltz Girl and her big girl in Rubies were among this season's greatest triumphs. Grand, regal, mysterious, Kondaurova took Serenade to other planes whenever she graced the stage, sometimes even taking Osmolkina and Gonchar with her. There are dancers like Gonchar in every company: strong, versatile, dependable and not particularly musical, imaginative or, well, interesting. I could easily name her opposite numbers in ABT or NYCB, but what's the point? I complain of Osmolkina's lack of magic because I'm convinced she can do far, far more, yet compared to Gonchar, she's a dancing Sarah Bernhardt (perhaps not the best metaphor for a dancer, but nevermind). I can't rail commensurately against Gonchar for her artistic blind spots because, well, what would be the point? She's quite probably living up to her entire potential, and things could be worse, couldn't they?

Once again Alexander Sergeev almost strangled himself in Kondaurova's skirts during that big promenade in arabesque, although he seemed less inclined to push her off her leg. Do they ever rehearse this promenade? Why does it go off so badly with the Kirov and so seamlessly with many other companies? I think perhaps the Kirov's versions of Karinska's blue dresses have a lot more skirt, but I could be wrong. It's a puzzlement.

Rubies

A little existential humor, as Viktoria Tereshkina's absence was announced with the word that, in this performance, Diana Vishneva would be replaced by Olesia Novikova. Poor Tereshkina — can't get no respect. Novikova was much the same sweet little kid-sister she'd been the night before (or even leading Raymonda, for that matter); Anton Korsakov virtuosic, even game in the funkier bits, but rather tragically blank-faced. A blank baby-face, at that. Gonchar's Little-Big-Girl was much the same as her Russian Girl: she tried, but had neither the stature, musical wit or inner fire to accomplish much of note with the role, other than looking very uncomfortable at assuming that huge unsupported plié in second before the four men start manipulating her by her ankles and wrists.

Ballet Imperial

Despite the occasional too-slow tempo, the Ballet Imperial was great fun. Alina Somova gave an almost too-gutsy turn in the lead, and she and the equally flashy, but tidier, Vladimir Shklyarov egged each other on to grander flights of slightly self-conscious heroics. In her first solo, Somova had some trouble with the pirouettes into tendu, noticeably braking herself with a stabbing toe and tweaking her balance rather than just cleanly stopping. Minor goofs, but they broke the spell of invincibility with which the Ballet Imperial ballerina should swath herself. She didn't let these small gaffes phase her (an atomic bomb wouldn't phase her), and attacked the rest of that solo with a gutsy enthusiasm which only charmed me the more for its occasional gaucherie. If the pirouettes into tendu weren't all pretty, her pirouettes into attitude were all the more breathtaking as she stopped in a deep, deep plie with her leg arched high and tightly behind her in one of her shapes that hum with extreme, neo-Classical energy: chevrons, diamonds, deep, deep vees. (This in a company which, for all it honors Balanchine, acts as if it has never heard of neo-Classicism, and never wishes to.) Her feet may be only serviceable, but her long legs are magnificent, and she wields them like scythes. She didn't exactly mow down Balanchine and Tchaikovsky, but she is all about attack and subjugation. I loved watching her energy coil like a spring in those slow, backward-stepping rénversés, and explode in big, big, big sissonnes, like fireworks, or pop rocks exploding in your mouth.

It would be easy to catalog her awkwardnesses, and, indeed, many have. She's also got great strengths, which consist of much more than just her celebrated and scorned flexibility, and I loved watching her both struggle and triumph in pairing her gifts with Balanchine's. It was far from the best Ballet Imperial/PC No. 2 I've seen, but it was one of the most human. In her first big adagio with Shklyarov, in the first movement, she got a bit carried away in her grand ballerina mannerisms, regarding the stage about her (if not the world) with the gleeful, wide-eyed smile of a gourmande who's just spied the dessert cart. In her slowly accelerating solo here, she flicked her long legs towards each side of the stage in big battements before enfolding them back in slow raccourcis, and each kick seemed to be saying to the corps lined up by the wings, "this stage is mine, girls, and don't you forget it." When Shklyarov lifted her high above his shoulders before the duet's final pose, she audibly gasped with delight at the height of the lift, and fixed the audience with an improbably wider smile. She projected a raw, unfiltered avarice which both frightened and elated me; in this company of careful accouterment and disciplined, dispassionate presentation, here was Somova emotionally naked as a jaybird, red in tooth and claw, and I wanted more. She was far from perfect, but she was alive.

For his part, Shklyarov partnered her both bravely and wisely, adding some fuel to the artistic blaze with some big, thigh-smacking double cabrioles, flashing beats and head-snapping, punchy double tours to the kneed. His leaps elicited cheers, and by the movement's end they both had the audience, well, most of it, well entranced indeed. In the slow second movement, Somova reined in her persona a bit, while still conjuring up the air of a grand, romantic visitation. In the allegro third, she was on fire, on the razor's edge between aggressive and overbaked. I liked the ferocious power of her flash-bulb fouéttés while marveling at how loose her hyperextended right knee must be — I've never seen a dancer flick her foot so far above vertical while cranking her leg outwards at each turn. Is it sloppy, or do he legs just work that way? I question, but in the end I accept.

Filling in for the Rubies-bound Novikova, Nadezhda Gonchar was her familiar strong, assured and not-very-exciting self, in what should be an utterly thrilling solo role. I can't help but remember how the ill-starred Monique Meunier used to set the stage ablaze in this role during her brief tenure at ABT years ago; for all Gonchar's undeniable power, she seemed oddly placid, even in mid-leap. Alexander Sergeev and Maxim Zyuzin flew alongside her with considerably more brio, and Yana Selina and Svetlana Ivanova were the beautiful demis who anchored the garlands of corps girls against Shklyarov in the long, long (here, very long) adagio.

April 19e

Serenade

A heroine of this season, the statuesque redhead, Ekaterina Kondaurova, has won herself many fans, and the well-deserved nickname "Big Red." Her Waltz Girl was as I'd come to expect from her: generous in phrasing, grand of scale, with the City Center stage an almost too-small cage for the span of her arms and shoulders. As stylistically correct as Osmolkina, Kondaurova doesn't retire into correctness, but uses it as a sculptor's chisel or printmaker's burin to add definition, burnish and a subtle charge to her dramatically tinged performance. "Definition" is a word which comes easily to mind in describing Kondaurova — I spent much of the season in somewhat admiration of her upper body's musculature. Her shoulders and upper arms aren't at all bulky, but superbly shaped and delineated. It's no wonder she's such an awesome power onstage. She doesn't obscure or efface the muscular underpinnings of her authority, nor does she underscore them, as a more resolutely athletic dancer might (Somova, or nine-tenths of New York City Ballet). Her physicality's just there — the impeccably polished, oiled and driven engine of her sublimity. In the Elegie, her love and loss became Tragedy written across the heavens. Who else to partner her but the tall and also impeccable Korsuntsev? Osmolkina's airy, weightless Russian Girl contrasted nicely with Kondaurova's strong anchoring, and Daria Vasnetsova was a long, limber if somewhat light-weight Dark Angel. Again, Alexander Sergeev almost pushed her off her leg in that slow promenade in arabesque. Don't they ever rehearse this?

Rubies

Replacing Somova was — surprise! — Novikova, who turned in her best performance to date against Leonid Sarafanov. Sarafanov blazed through the role with demi-caractere bravura, and a playful wackiness. He was out there to show off and have fun, and drew Novikova into a slightly riskier, more assured performance. Gonchar repeated as the Not-So-Big-Girl, and I've been remiss in not mentioning the brilliant, flying quarted of men at each performance: Anton Pimonov, Alexey Nedviga, Maxim Khrebtov and Vasily Shcherbakov. They were wonderfully together, brilliant and airborne, although not particularly jazzy (I'm relieved that they didn't particularly try, either).

Ballet Imperial

Here we had the Kirov's créme de la créme, Uliana Lopatkina partnered with the just-passing-through Igor Zelensky. I'd missed Zelensky's turn as the Golden Slave in what the Kirov was passing off as Scheherezade, so I was glad to catch him here. As he strode onstage, so elegantly, for his first adagio with Lopatkina, I thought, "what a mensch!" I'd been a little surprised, when I looked up the Kirov's complete roster on their website, that the assortment of men the Kirov brought to New York weren't really the mixed bag of interesting but not always superb dancers I'd thought them to be. Or, rather, they were, but Fadeev, Korsuntsev, Korsakov, Sarafanov, Kolb, et. al. are also all top-ranked principals. It's not that these men are bad — they're not, except, sometimes, for Kolb — but they hardly seem to match the distinction, polish and authority of the current wonderful generations of women. (I expected, from their dancing, that the men's rankings to be scattered and various, while the women would all be at the top; instead it was exactly the opposite.)

Even nearing the end of his career, the blond, Apollonian Zelensky has a presence and authority unrivaled by the Kirov's other principals. If his beats aren't quite as sharp as they once were, his leaps as high or his landings as springy, it hardly matters. In the long, second-act adagio, Zelensky made a little poetic drama of the moment's before Lopatkina's appearance, standing at a downstage corner, pointing with a delicate forefinger past the edge of the stage, following with his gaze an apparition in the air which only he could see, and turning slowly downstage as his vision seemed to alight and become — Lopatkina, upstage and center. In other hands this might've seemed a bit silly and overdone, but Zelensky's authority made it beautifully inevitable. In their adagios together, Lopatkina and Zelensky were little short of heavenly. She swept through the Balanchine's curves and recurves with magisterial calm, and just the right hint of ballerina regality in his most dramatic poses, with Zelensky her powerful, ever-attentive consort, lover and prince. If at times it seemed the two were presenting a treatise on the Art of the Ballerina, it could also have been the Bible.

All was not perfection, though, for Lopatkina. The word on the street was that she'd been coached in Ballet Imperial by Merrill Ashley, one of the role's greatest dancers, as reworked into PC No. 2. While one might imagine that a legendary allegro dancer might be just the person to bring a brilliant but not-so-allegro dancer like Lopatkina quite literally up to speed, such was, apparently, not the case. Perhaps Ashley and Lopakina couldn't bridge the vast gulf between their temperaments, techniques and training; whatever the reason, Lopatkina looked stiff and ill-at-ease in her opening solo, awkwardly stabbing her toes to bring those pirouettes on half-toe to ragged halts, and, in general, clamping a tight mask of affectlessness over what had to have been an unhappy experience. This solo crystallized for me things I'd noticed in her Bayaderes, that she often would look tight, cramped and uncomfortable in some allegro moments. I thought perhaps she wasn't used to City Center's stage, but seeing her in Ballet Imperial, I began to think that perhaps, despite her lyrical grandeur, she's not an great allegro dancer, at least not in the Balanchinean mold. At the finale of the first movement, she seemed totally off the beat compared to the dancers around her, her brisé volées looking to be on entirely the wrong foot. No, Balanchine didn't mean for the ballerina to be leaping in counterpoint to the corps, but Lopatkina was behind, and couldn't catch up (she's not the only Russian to come to grief here — I remember Vishneva having the same problem in her Ballet Imperial debut with ABT a few years ago).

If it wasn't a perfect performance, it did have those adagio moments to treasure. Once again, Gonchar was an uninspiring soloist, although the corps looked better and better, especially the male ensemble with its huge, synchronized beats and sissonnes in the third movement.

April 20

Serenade

Viktoria Tereshkina, this season's Miss Perfect, continued to be so in Serenade. If her Waltz Girl wasn't as grandly tragic as Kondaurova's, or as raw as Somova's, it was a study in beautifully realized detail and subtly applied power. If I remember more her big, booming leaps, or the filigree of bourrees with which she teasingly fled the following Yevgeny Ivanchenko in the waltz than the emotional affect of her final collapse and skyward flight at the curtain, it doesn't diminish her accomplishment for me. She's a dancer of tremendous clarity and honesty, and she teased to light little choreographic gems (like those extra-delicate bourrees) with the authority of a restorer picking out a painting's highlights and shadows with a fine-hair brush. If, like Osmolkina, Tereshkina didn't find all the ballet's magic, she did render it with respect, precision and great musicality. As an interpreter, Tereshkina always gives good weight; it's one of the things I've come to respect and admire about her. In the other leads, Kondaurova, Gonchar and Sergeev were much as they'd been, respectively awesome, adequate and pretty.

Rubies

While still not quite the jazzy, syncopated kaleidoscope it should be, this Rubies was the best yet. This time, the scheduled ballerina actually appeared — of course it was Novikova again. Vladimir Shklyarov was wonderful, not too manic, but athletic, edgy and having tremendous fun. Novikova had fun, too, and if it was clean, on-the-beat fun rather than sexy, vulgar, brassy fun (oh, where were Vishneva and Somova?), she was nonetheless exhilarating and endearing. The star of the show, not surprisingly, was Kondaurova, who was a controlled, thundering, slow-motion explosion in scarlet and crimson, a refracted melding of Myrtha and Lilac Fairy, all in double-time. Perhaps better than any Kirov ballerina, she came to represent for me that company's ideal of power harnessed in the service of Art, or Vaganova. She never strays far from correctness, even in Balanchine, but she's not above straying quite wonderfully when her heart tells her. I'm really going to miss her.

I'll just add in passing that by now the charming pianist, who'd played two grueling leads at each Balanchine program, was beginning to sound quite ragged, and more so to come in Ballet Imperial. Given her workload, I couldn't resent her for her mistakes, and doesn't the Kirov have more than one decent pianist?

Ballet Imperial

Somova again, replacing an apparently injured Vishneva. She works well with Fadeev; she's a bit of a wild child, and he's calm, cool and collected. This pairing wasn't as viscerally exciting as Somova's with Shklyarov, but it was better. Fadeev proved an emotional anchor for Somova's excesses, and a perfect setting to her flashing diamond. It's hard for me to sum up Somova as she's still so clearly a work in progress. I wonder, though, if the Kirov is the place for her; there is this other company in New York City which might have some ballerina slots opening up pretty soon, but I digress. Osmolkina was ethereal as ever in the soloist role, flying about, again, with Shklyarov and Zyuzin.

I'm finishing up this review the morning after seeing New York City Ballet's Spring Gala, and it's been hard watching the company with Kirov-acclimated eyes. Sigh. I hope we won't have to wait six more years in New York for the Kirov to return, even though booking a proper house here can be problematic; I know I won't wait so long again!