An enjoyable soufflé that doesn’t quite rise
There are few ballet plots thinner than that of Marius Petipa’s 1869 romantic romp, Don Quixote.
Taken from a wafer-thin section of Cervantes’s picaresque masterpiece, it concerns a barber (Basil) who gets his girl (Kitri) despite her father’s disapproval, while a hopeless old knight errant (the Don himself) teeters about, gets bumped on the head by a windmill and has a vision of the lady of his dreams, Dulcinea. That, give or take, is it – by comparison, even the ever-anodyne Sleeping Beauty looks like the last word in edgy, serpentine, postmodern narrative.
What “Don Q” does, however, have, is one sparkling high-classical set-piece after another. Here presented in Alexei Fadeyechev’s 2016 restoration, it is the sort of boisterous,
full-evening showpiece that is very much in the Bolshoi’s bloodstream (and was, after all, created for the great Muscovite company), and with the right performance, it can really fly.
That Thursday evening’s rendition didn’t quite achieve full lift-off was, then, a great surprise, especially to someone who was completely won over by a pile-driving Spartacus and exquisite Swan Lake earlier in this summer’s three-week Covent Garden residency. It was full of energy, the corps were strikingly united as ever, and the Bolshoi’s visiting house orchestra excelled itself with Minkus’s sunny, sub-rossini, rum-ti-tum score.
The problem lay very largely, however, with the two leads, who – on this first night of the London revival – both felt over-exposed. In Act I, set in a Barcelona town square, Basil and Kitri need to look to all intents and purposes as though they want to rip each other’s clothes off. Here, there was only the politest, remotest connection between Margarita Shrainer and Igor Tsvirko.
He made for a distractingly tense partner, completely botching one big lift in Act I, holding the next one too long as a kind of meretricious compensation, and looking visibly relieved when he was “allowed” to do his own thing as opposed to tend to his ballerina. What’s more, although he fired off his solo showpieces with crowd-pleasing muscularity, “fired off” is very much the phrase – there was no poetry there at all.
Shrainer, too, rather fell into the trap of prioritising showmanship over detail. She’s a lovely dancer in many ways, but typical of her performance here was that in the closing fouettés of the Act III grand pas, she pushed too hard for multiple pirouettes and ended up pretty much facing the back of the stage. Throughout, too, she failed to use her spine to any sort of lyrical effect and danced capably to – rather than lyrically with – the music, traits that were shared by several of the other female soloists.
Of course, the Bolshoi doesn’t have the same Ashtonian tradition that the Royal Ballet has. But what’s telling is that the performers on Thursday who did, so to speak, truly put their backs into it, and who most clearly demonstrated those very Ashtonian traits of épaulement, musically aware phrasing and 360-degree upper-body pliancy – Daria Bochkova, Elizaveta Kruteleva, Ekaterina Bondarenko and the ever-wonderful Anna Tikhomirova – were also the most involving.
So, not quite the farewell I’d hoped to be able to give the Bolshoi this time round, though the evening made for enjoyable, colourful froth all the same. I would gently suggest , however, that maybe next time round the Bolshoi – and indeed their St Petersburg rivals, the Mariinsky – leave the dear old Don at home when they next visit. In Carlos Acosta’s 2013 production for the Royal Ballet, there is now a very glossy and (I increasingly realise) remarkably nimble version already in situ at Covent Garden. By contrast, Spartacus, The Bright Stream and their ilk are like nothing we have here, and they are the productions, above all, that make these visits from across the Urals such eternally exciting prospects.