BOLSHOI BALLET, RAYMONDA, COLISEUM, LONDON, JULY 1999 |
| From: OBSERVER, July
25, 1999 Dance Review by Jann Parry RAYMONDA’S REVUE BARRELondon has been blessed in the past week with some exceptional achievements: Nina Ananiashvili with the Bolshoi in Raymonda... Raymonda was mounted by Rudolf Nureyev in 1966 for the Royal Ballet's touring company. Only the third act was deemed worth retaining - an error, as the full-length versions danced by the Paris Opera Ballet and the Bolshoi amply prove. Raymonda's storyline may be absurd, but the opportunities it offers for dancing are glorious. Raymonda requires a real ballerina in the title role and top-flight soloists among the heroine's supporters and enemies - her two best girlfriends and a corps de ballet multiply her brilliance like prisms. The opposing camp is led by Abderakham, a savage Saracen who menaces Raymonda's virtue by embodying her worst fears - and desires. Dmitri Belogolovtsev wins over the audience, though Ananiashvili's maiden, a plum ripe for picking, is saved by the cavalry, led by nice, noble Jean de Brienne (Sergei Filin). Ananiashvili's technique is so secure that you can watch in perfect happiness as she phrases each solo variation to reveal a facet of her personality. Mesmerised by Abderakham's surging leaps, her pirouettes turn outwards instead of inwards, as she involuntarily opens her body towards him. The Hungarian solo in the wedding scene becomes Raymonda's riposte. She washes her hands of the past but incorporates the Oriental voluptuousness she has learnt from Abderakham's entourage into her Magyar dance. Filin takes to the air in delight and reels off the cleanest set of turns a Bolshoi hero has so far managed. But Ananiashvili dances without exaggeration, and the corps and soloists do her proud.
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