ICSM Online Journal > Reviews

Shostakovich and Khachaturyan, The Bolshoi Ballet, New York, July 2005

Reviewed by Louis Blois
posted 9 Augst 2005

The Bolshoi Ballet demonstrated their renowned flamboyance to New York audiences during the last two weeks in July 2005 in an exclusive engagement with the Metropolitan Opera. The four works on their billboard, each a full evening’s event, are intimately associated with the company: The Pharaoh’s Daughter and Don Quixote, both dating from the 1860s, and two works that came into being during the Stalin era, Khachaturyan’s Spartacus and Shostakovich’s Bright Stream. The latter two are of particular interest and are not without political intrigue.

It is not hard to see why Spartacus has become a signature piece for the Bolshoi. The ballet presents a powerful and sweeping narrative of love, war, victory, and defeat, infused with lavish tunes of the kind that only Khachaturyan could conceive. The Bolshoi’s staging is a banquet for the eyes. To some it is their ne plus ultra. The collaborative partnership of the music with Yuri Grigorovich's forceful choreography yields the most masculine and heroic of ballets. If the work were to be judged only on the basis of the music, however, one might not expect as much. Unlike Khachaturyan's earlier ballet masterpiece, Gayaneh, with its nonstop supply of dozens of ingratiating tunes, Spartacus offers a mere handful – though a very memorable handful – which are fairly well recycled throughout. As such it does not make a very nourishing listening experience on its own. Although there are many recordings of the Spartacus orchestral suites, only a few offer the complete score, among them a fine two-CD set with Mikhail Jurowski leading the orchestra and chorus of the Deutsches SO of Berlin (Capriccio 10 817/18); and an equally fine four-LP set on Melodiya featuring the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra led by Algis Zuraitis (S 10-06299-306).

As a fully realised ballet, Spartacus transforms into something miraculous. The ensemble scenes in this male warrior-dominated work filled the stage with spectacular effect. In the performance I attended, each of the four principals moved with the perfected poetry one expects from the Bolshoi. Alexander Vorobiev as Spartacus cut a trim, stoically firm figure who gracefully executed his many heroic leaps. While his motions were forceful, his unflinching deadpan, even during curtain calls, could be a bit disaffecting. The beautiful Nina Kaptsova gave a particularly fine portrayal of Spartacus’s love, Phrygia , with fluid body motion enhanced by emotive facial expressions. Her closing monologue, mourning the death of Spartacus, was memorable and heart-rending. Vladimir Neporozny as the Roman army leader, Crassus, carried a lean, charismatic figure whose proud strutting captured his character’s militaristic hubris. Ekaterina Shipulina gave a superb interpretation of the avaristic Aegina , a courtesan in Crassus’s camp. Her keynote dance, the seduction of the insurgents in Scene 11, was splendidly erotic.

Sets were sparse and rather rustic in contrast to the wonderfully detailed and colourful costuming. I couldn’t help noticing the difference in styles and interpretation between this and the Bolshoi’s 1977 production of Spartacus as captured on the well-circulated DVD. The choreography there, as in the current run, was the work of Grigorovich, and fell under the direction of Vadim Derbenev. Derbenev’s realisation is one that is more tightly conceived, with more thrusting, brawny gestures and muscular physiques on the part of the male principals. In the ensemble work, gladiators and insurgents alike impress with their synchronised movements in response to the music’s robust rhythms. While one did not see as much attention to co-ordinated detail in the otherwise fine group scenes in the current production, directed by Alexei Ratmansky, it had the upper hand in portraying the passionate interplay between Spartacus and Phrygia .

The storyline of Spartacus, a failed uprising against a cruel and despotic ruler, has deep resonances with the events in Russian and Soviet history. The theme has been taken up in any number of Russian compositions, notably in Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony, a work that recapitulates the failed workers’ uprising of 1905; and similarly in his cantata The Execution of Stepan Razin, which recounts the final dissenting moments of the well-known folk hero. The relevance of these themes to the events of Shostakovich’s own troubled career is self-explanatory and has often been addressed. Though we don’t readily associate such political pitfalls with Khachaturyan’s life and music, a revealing documentary about the composer, produced by Peter Rosen in 2003 and reviewed in this Journal, paints a slightly different picture. Khachaturyan evidently suffered severe humiliation and temporary creative collapse as a result of Stalin’s notorious 1948 rebukes against Soviet composers. We learn that Spartacus, composed in 1950, bore significance to Khachaturyan as a resuscitation of his lapsed creativity; and that he found personal identification with the ancient Roman hero as a fellow warrior, likewise defiant in the face of adversity. It casts an interesting new light on the prevailing narrative of the work.

The other Stalin-era work on the Bolshoi’s charts, Shostakovich’s Bright Stream, made its North American premiere at these performances. The ballet stakes its claim on music history and on Shostakovich’s career by having elicited a crushing denunciation in the pages of Pravda a full eight months after its premiere (‘Ballet Falsity’, 6 February 1936 ). It appeared one week after the more infamous denunciation of Shostakovich’s opera Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk (‘Muddle instead of Music’, 28 January 1936 ). The crude prose of the articles had all the earmarks of Stalin’s hand.

The combined attacks virtually shut down Shostakovich’s career. Even worse, the original choreographer, Fyodor Lopukhov, was fired as director of The Bolshoi; and the author of the scenario, Adrian Piotrovsky, disappeared into one of Stalin’s gulags. After a period of ostensible ‘rehabilitation’, Shostakovich concentrated his creativity on other genres and sadly, never completed another ballet or opera.

The announcement of the 2003 revival of Bright Stream aroused much curiosity as to the nature of the ballet that had so offended official taste. What New York audiences were treated to was not an undiscovered masterpiece on the same order as Lady Macbeth or even Spartacus, for that matter. Rather, Bright Stream turns out to be a satirical, one might say vaudevillian, production filled with exaggerated characters and whimsical plot turns, all danced to a score that amounts to little more than a series of benign, often charming, musical numbers. What could the fuss have been all about? The main storyline could not have been more Soviet: a group of cosmopolitan artists visits their more rustic counterparts on a collective farm by the name of Bright Stream and eventually discover how well they can celebrate life together. The official objections that were voiced in Pravda had to do with a perceived lack of connection of the work to folk music and to collective farming.

Many of the numbers in Bright Stream were subsequently arranged into a series of ballet suites in the 1950s by Shostakovich’s friend, Lev Avtomyan. The music has become familiar to many from the numerous issues and reissues that have appeared since that time. In the performance of Bright Stream that I attended, Vladimir Neporozhny and Nina Kaptsova reappeared as principals. It was a vast under-exploitation of talent to have such high-calibre dancers engaged in the nonstop shenanigans that took place on stage. As gratifying as it was to see these familiar ditties choreographed in their original context, Bright Stream lacks the broad appeal and staying power of a Bolshoi staple. For that reason the curious may have few opportunities left to see a live performance of this historic oddity and otherwise, pleasantly diverting evening at the ballet.

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