Dance Review by Clive Barnes

HAILING HOUSTON "SNOW", FORECAST FOR NYC

HOUSTON. These days, as you may have noticed, there is a grievous shortage of new Tchaikovsky ballet scores, probably because Tchaikovsky himself has inconsiderately stopped writing them. However, some ingenious choreographers have gotten ’round the difficulty with a little help from their friends - musicologists, arrangers and the like.

So, if one tires of The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, it is still possible to create a new Tchaikovsky ballet score from existing music, freshly orchestrated and cunningly tailored to fit...

The latest of these The Snow Maiden is offered by Ben Stevenson’s Houston Ballet, a joint production with American Ballet Theater, which is due to enter the ABT repertory at the Metropolitan Opera House this spring.

This brilliantly danced new - comer is markedly more successful, I think, than either of its two major predecessors, both British: the Soviet choreographer Vladimir Bourmeister’s version for the English National Ballet in 1961 and David Bintley’s production... for the Birmingham Royal Ballet in 1986.

This new staging, apart from its considerable dance merits, also has the benefit of a very sumptuously devised score by John Lanchbery, and positively bewitching scenery and costumes by Desmond Heeley...

I caught three casts in Houston... The only dancer to repeat her role in Ballet Theater’s restaging of the work in New York will be Nina Ananiashvili (for whom the ballet was created), who is tremulous and infinitely touching in the title role.

In Houston, her dazzlingly stylish partner, as the hero Misgir, was the young Cuba-born superstar Carlos Acosta...

Apart from the incomparable Ananiashvili, both Barbara Bears and... Lauren Anderson scintillated icily as the Snow Maiden...