Dance Review by Anna Kisselgoff

A DIAGHILEVIAN STAGING

Rimsky-Korsakov did not call «Mlada» an opera-ballet for nothing, and it was not surprising that the strongest ovation on Friday night went to Nina Ananiashvili, ...ballerina from the Bolshoi Ballet, who appeared in two of the opera company’s performances at the Metropolitan Opera House.

This triumph owes much to Miss Ananiashvili’s exquisite style. Her Cleopatra in a vision scene had a dynamic contrast with her beautiful lyricism as Mlada, the ghost who haunts her betrothed, the Slav pagan prince Yaromir.

«Mlada» is, nonetheless, also the perfect example of the mixed-genre spectacle that Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes introduced to the West. Rimsky-Korsakov’s music played an especially dominant role in those productions, and the tone of this contemporary staging of «Mlada» is very Diaghilevian in its colorful meshing of dance and music. One has only to recall that Diaghilev even inserted music from «Mlada» in 1909 into his ballet «Cleopatre».

Andrei Petrov, a former Bolshoi choreographer, has had to work with the various distancing effects in the production. At the end of Act III, Miss Ananiashvili takes off her shoes and outer costume. She is thus identified as a village lass who dances the roles of Mlada’s ghost and Cleopatra, who is conjured up in a dream.

The pagan scenes are an ethnologist’s delight, and Mr. Petrov has done wonders with all sorts of ritualistic circles, games, witches, buffoons and divining rods. He knows how to fill a stage.

Nonetheless, he opts for conventions. Miss Ananiashvili, on toe, and Aleksei Malykhin, a tall, imposing partner, have a standard Soviet love pas de deux in Act I, notable for the ballerina’s elongated line.