Bolshoi ballet brightens screen
THE BRIGHT Stream should have been a high point for composer Dimitri Shostakovich. Instead, it led to his music being ignored in his homeland for decades.
Between 1929 and 1935, Shostakovich wrote a trio of ballet scores for The Golden Age, The Bolt and The Bright Stream. All three ballets were banned shortly after their premieres, mostly due to his involvement, and he never wrote ballet scores again.
The ballet’s co-librettist, Adrian Piotrovsky, was sent to the Gulag and the choreographer, Fedor Lopukhov’s career was cut short.
In hindsight, The Bright Stream should have found favour with the Stalinist regime – it was set on a farming collective and featured snatches of folk melodies and familiar dance numbers.
At the time, ballet as an art form was still in favour, but none of the artists had a handle on how to artistically portray Socialist realism without getting into trouble and making this a funny comedy with a dog on a bicycle was not the way.
So, the piece languished in the history books as a footnote as to what not to do, until Alexei Ratmansky, former director of the Bolshoi Ballet, came across the full score of the ballet in a recording made by Gennady Rozhdestvensky in Stockholm in 1995. Unable to restore the original choreography by Lopukhov, Ratmansky choreographed his own version and staged it with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow in 2003.
The Bright Stream is set during the harvest festival on a collective farm when a visiting dance troupe reunites a ballerina (Maria Alexandrova) with her old childhood friend, Zina (Svetlana Lunkina).
In order to teacher her unfaithful husband a lesson, Zina, the ballerina and the ballerina’s husband (Ruslan Skvortsov) swap roles for the evening. Mikhail Lobukhin (Pyotr), Denis Savin and Alexei Loparevich (the Old Dacha Dweller) round out the principles.
Ratmansky’s two-act comedy was captured for the big screen in a performance in Moscow on April 29, 2012, which is the version that is now broadcast on Ster-Kinekor screens for a limited time.
It plays Saturday, Wednesday, Thursday and October 22, 26 and 27 at 7.30pm and on Sunday at 2.30pm. The running time of 150 minutes includes one interval. –
Film Writer The Golden Age will be broadcast next month.