United Kingdom Tchaikovsky, The Sleeping Magnificence: Dancers of Birmingham Royal Ballet, Royal Ballet Sinfonia / Philip Ellis (conductor), Sadler’s Wells, London, 24.4.2024. (JO’D)
Creatives:
Choreography – Marius Petipa, Lev Ivanov, Sir Peter Wright
Music – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Manufacturing – Sir Peter Wright
Designs – Philip Prowse
Lighting – Mark Jonathan (tailored by Johnny Westall-Eyre)
Forged included:
King Florestan XXI – Jonathan Payn
His Queen – Yvette Knight
Princess Aurora – Yu Kurihara
Prince Florimund – Lachlan Monaghan
The Fairy Carabosse – Daria Stanciulescu
The Lilac Fairy – Eilis Small
Principals, First Soloists, Soloists, First Artists and Artists of Birmingham Royal Ballet
It was at Sadler’s Wells in 1939 that ‘the primary actual try’ was made, after Sergei Diaghilev’s The Sleeping Princess of 1921, to revive Marius Petipa’s unique model of The Sleeping Magnificence (1890). This week Birmingham Royal Ballet introduced Sir Peter Wright’s 1984 manufacturing of the ballet again to Islington, the place it was carried out in an environment of intimate grandeur.
Philip Prowse’s ‘post-modern’ designs (black and gold, marbled surfaces, an obelisk) gown the Lilac Fairy and the Fairy Carabosse as mirror pictures of one another: ‘good’ and ‘evil’, life and loss of life. This displays the corresponding themes which are current from the very starting of Tchaikovsky’s ‘symphonic’ rating, which is performed with verve by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia underneath Philip Ellis. Costume selections for a number of the different characters (fairies, princes) make them tougher to differentiate from the dancers round them on the populated stage.
As Princess Aurora, First Soloist Yu Kurihara made the climax of the Rose Adagio on the opening evening look as tough to carry out as I’ve ever seen it look. After that, although, her dancing sparkled, in each higher and decrease limbs, just like the diamonds on the headdress she wears within the Act II Imaginative and prescient Scene. Lachlan Monaghan was a robust, thoughtful-looking Prince Florimund, able to find moments of stillness within the music and the dance.
Daria Stanciulescu, because the Fairy Carabosse, was by no means a caricature or pantomime determine. As Florimund pauses to mirror earlier than kissing Aurora awake from her hundred-year-long sleep, the Lilac Fairy (Eilis Small) and Carabosse are equally vivid presences on the stage. The risk posed by the latter a severe one as much as the final second.
The dances in celebration of Aurora’s wedding ceremony are carried out with allure, playfulness and elan. Enrique Bejarano Vidal appears to drift leisurely within the air as The Bluebird. Pink Driving Hood and the Wolf (Rosanne Ely and Callum Findlay-White) function a reminder that fairy tales, even in a fairy story, don’t all the time have completely happy endings.
The costumes for this act are up to date from the mid-to-late seventeenth century of Act I to the mid-to-late eighteenth century wherein Florimund is proven to reside in Act II. This helps dispel the sensation you get on the finish of different productions of the ballet, specifically that Florimund (who has refused the love of a ‘actual’ girl, the Countess) chooses to reside surrounded by fairy story characters 100 years earlier than his correct time.
A number of the different selections made, to modernise the manufacturing maybe, are extra questionable. The show of poisonous masculinity by two of the 4 princes who come to supply Aurora their hand in marriage. The way in which one in all them follows Aurora across the stage after being rejected. However it’s a superb concept to have the Lilac Fairy and Carabosse take their curtain name collectively. It reinforces the distinction between the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ that the ballet has essentially been about. It additionally forestalls the boos with which Carabosse may be greeted by a up to date viewers that makes no distinction between character and dancer.
John O’Dwyer