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Bolshoi 2014-2015 Season


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Ballet performances will include “The Legend of Love,” choreographed by Yuri Grigorovich, and the world premiere in March 2015 of a new staging of “Hamlet,” with choreography by Radu Poklitaru. Also, the world premiere of a ballet based on Mikhail Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time,” is scheduled for June 2015, choreographed by Yuri Possokhov.

2015 tours to Hong Kong and São Paulo, Brazil.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/bolshoi-theater-plans-tchaikovsky-celebrations/?ref=arts

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/casting-disappoints-in-legend-of-love/510670.html

Raymond Stults writes about his disappointment of the revival of Yuri Grigorovich's "Legend of Love."

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I, too, had thought that Legend of Love was Grigorovich's strongest work, but after watching the most recent film of the ballet, I realized I had been mistaken. I agree that performances of these works are growing progressively weaker with each generation of dancers. The 2014 combination of Allash-Nikulina-Rodkin was feebler than a video from the late 1990s with Allash-Ryzhkina-Belogolovtsev, which in turn was paler than the 1990 film with Bylova-Mikhalchenko-Mukhamedov (and to say that I was never an admirer of Maria Bylova would be putting it mildly). And I also find balletic pseudo-orientalism generally tiresome, but this is a problem that extends far beyond Grigorovich. Unfortunately, I don't think anything could redeem Melikov's music or Virsaladze's designs.

I am not at all convinced that these ballets merit preservation, but if the Bolshoi is going to continue to dance them, they need far more convincing performances than they have been getting.

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My mom loved it, I found that I could just not find anything enjoyable in the choreography. The silly attempts at "oriental" arms were just as painfully awful as Grigorovich's attempts at Southeast Asian traditional folk dancing in "La Bayadere". I had heard "Legend of Love" was the best of Grigorovich's choreography, but I wasn't impressed.

The dram-ballet story is inscrutible if you don't have the 2 page (in tiny type!) flyer to read, or the ever-elegant Katerina Novikova to explain everything to you. I adore her and wish she was my friend in real life, even if she has to sugar coat choreographic soured cabbage to make us think it is pierogi.

The dancers deserved so much better than this. At least the orchestra played their hearts out.

Is the Lacotte Daughter of the Pharoah worthwhile? I'm debating if I want to waste $16 or go see an Oscar potential movie instead.

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Is the Lacotte Daughter of the Pharoah worthwhile? I'm debating if I want to waste $16 or go see an Oscar potential movie instead.

I enjoyed that performance of The Pharaoh's Daughter very much. It is very silly, but in a fun, unpretentious way. The music is entirely inconsequential, but also inoffensive, with exactly one ditty that sticks in my head and refuses to go away. (There it is now.) Svetlana Zakharova and Ruslan Skvortsov must be in the running for most beautiful-looking pairing in the history of the art form, and the degree of synchronization they achieved in the numerous side-by-side sequences was remarkable.

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Is the Lacotte Daughter of the Pharoah worthwhile? I'm debating if I want to waste $16 or go see an Oscar potential movie instead.

It's the only ballet I've ever walked out of during a performance - I just couldn't handle the blackface sections and the laughs they were getting. That said, the dancing was pretty and I'm still curious what was going to happen that I missed. As mentioned above, the music is pretty twiddly-twattily silly.

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