Translated material
History of ballet on DVD
Here is Don Quixote with Nadezhda Pavlova and Vyacheslav Gordeev, recording 1978. A legendary, star couple... The future People's Artist of the USSR, in 1973 still a girl from Perm, at the age of 17, boldly raised her leg to her ear and grabbed the Grand Prix of the Moscow competition. She captivated the audience and immediately became a soloist at the Bolshoi Theater and the youngest performer of the roles of Juliet and Giselle.
The recording is also interesting because it preserves the old Moscow version of Don Quixote, staged in the 40s of the twentieth century. The same one where the famous Marina Semenova and Olga Lepeshinskaya danced and which has not been performed on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater for a long time. The disappeared numbers, the changed mise-en-scène, the style of performing characteristic dances - even the artists barely remember all this, not to mention the audience. It’s strange, but in the repertoire of the traditional Bolshoi Theater there is not a single performance left that dates back to the period before the accession of Yuri Grigorovich. You won’t see the choreography of Rostislav Zakharov, Leonid Lavrovsky, Vasily Vainonen, Kasyan Goleizovsky there today... This recording at least partially fills the gap.
In addition, an invaluable bonus is included - fragments of "Don Quixote" with Maya Plisetskaya, recordings from performances in 1964 and 1968 with the participation of Maris Liepa and Vladimir Tikhonov. Kitri of the frantic Maya has not been presented in such a volume before.
The highlight of the next disc is the Dutch documentary “Four Emperors and a Nightingale.” It tells the story of the ballet “The Song of the Nightingale” to the music of Igor Stravinsky and designed by Henri Matisse, staged for the Diaghilev enterprise first by Leonid Massine and then by George Balanchine. The plot is Andersen's fairy tale; at the premiere of the ballet in 1925, the role of the Nightingale was danced by the great Alicia Markova, and the role of the Mechanical Nightingale was danced by Balanchine. Balanchine himself appears in the film, and Markova not only talks about ballet, but even shows the movements to the young soloist. Balanchine's first wife, Tamara Zheva, and his second wife, the famous ballerina Alexandra Danilova, appear on the screen. Reconstructed fragments of the ballet are included. In addition, “The Song of the Nightingale” was recorded in its entirety - not in Balanchine’s production, but in a modern interpretation of the same music and plot.
The disc “Dancing for Dollars” includes two documentaries filmed by the British ten years ago and now released on DVD: “Big in Las Vegas” (1997) and “Kirovsky in St. Petersburg” (1998).
The first film is a sad story about how they decided to immediately make a lot of money from their past glory. Having neither experience nor commercial acumen, the then leaders of the Bolshoi Theater trusted the inept impresario. In October 1996, the troupe arrived in Las Vegas, a city where people gamble in casinos rather than watch ballets. The organizers rented huge halls, the stages were not suitable for dancing and the platforms were hastily built, everything was done at the last moment... As a result, it was barely possible to gather 200 spectators for the performance. Bolshoi did not receive a fee, and they barely managed to get the artists out. Several farmers from a tiny village in Oklahoma invested a million dollars in the project, counting on the big name of the Bolshoi Theater and focusing on the success of the 1959 tour throughout the cities and towns of the United States. Investors were completely burned out. I feel sorry for them most of all: simple village people who understand nothing about art. They were invited to performances, they sat in empty halls... No one stole, no one was to blame - it was just dollar fever, an acute disease common in those strange years.
The second film on the disc is also a sad story about the pursuit of dollars at the Mariinsky Theater. In general, both films are not attractive because of the ballet, they are very interesting as a reflection of a troubled period in the history of our country.