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Kirov's Le Corsaire Dazzles Paris
| Article
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14580 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
2,132 Words |
| Author
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David Stevens
David Stevens is music critic for the International Herald
Tribune. |
It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the dance company most in evidence in Paris this season has been the Kirov Ballet of Leningrad, which came in force to the French capital for the third time in nine years. The Kirov brought about half of its total complement of 210 dancers and its own orchestra, and stayed for eight weeks in the 3,007-seat Palais de Congrès, giving fifty performances of repertoire that included six complete ballets and two different programs of excerpts. (In the whole of this season, the principal troupe of the Paris Opera Ballet is scheduled to give only a few more performances than that on its main stage.)
So much for statistics. But we are talking about the company that represents the continuation of one of the prime sources of tradition for ballet the world over--the Maryinsky of the Maurice Petipa, with and without Tchaikovsky, and the school shaped in this century by Vaganova; a tradition that has produced not only the Kirov's own artistic director (Oleg Vinogradov), but those of Moscow's Bolshoi (Yuri Grigorovich), the Paris Opera Ballet (Rudolf Nureyev), and the American Ballet Theatre (Mikhail Baryshnikov), not to mention, from an earlier era, George Balanchine. The names of Nureyev and Baryshnikov are reminders of how hard the Kirov was hit by defections in the 1960s and 1970s, and this third visit since Vinogradov took over in 1977 has offered a chance to evaluate the return to health of a troupe that was badly shaken and low in morale a decade ago. These are all factors in the magnetism that drew not only Paris ballet addicts, but an army of fans, critics, photographers, and groupies from all over Western Europe and North America.
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