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Report From Leningrad: An Evening at the Kirov
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16257 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1989 |
1,228 Words |
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
It is snowing in Leningrad, and the city founded by Peter the Great on the banks of the Neva looks quite magical in the dark of early evening.
In the center of the city stands the Kirov Theater--named in commemoration of Sergey Kirov, whose assassination on Stalin's orders in 1934 touched off the Moscow Trials and the subsequent death of millions of Soviet citizens. Today, the fabled Kirov Ballet is performing the four-act Don Quichotte, which premiered at Moscow's Bolshoi in December 1869.
Tour buses disgorge dozens of tourists who throng into the brightly lit marble hall along with a press of local people. Outer garments and boots are checked on a lower floor in cloakrooms whose attendants dispense opera glasses for thirty kopecks a pair.
Bygone Feeling
Entering the theater is like entering another world or, more properly speaking, another age. All is sparkling white and gold, with five tiers of balconies rising to an elaborately chandeliered ceiling, a richly embroidered heavy gold and pale turquoise curtain, and individual velvet turquoise upholstered armchairs in the orchestra. Only the ornate gold hammer and sickle above the foyer royal box and the raised pattern of hammers and sickles in gold thread interwoven with the Cyrillic initials of the USSR remind one this is no longer the Maryinsky Theater of czarist times.
Don Quichotte was choreographed by that giant of nineteenth-century ballet, Marius Petipa, the father of Russian ballet.
... (1997 of 7272 Characters)
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