Prokofiev is by far my biggest obsession in life, and I started jumping up and down when I heard that Ratmansky was going to be choreographing On the Dnieper. It's an absolutely amazing score, and I've never heard of its being performed in the concert hall, much less as a dance piece. But it's more introverted than any of his other ballets. It exudes a rural atmosphere akin to Stone Flower, but with more fusion of melody and modernism, more rhythmic vitality. It's not the kind of rhythm that calls attention to itself, but rather it's integral to the melody. It tends to come and go without a fuss.
I went into this a bit on a post I made to an online reviewer. Ratmansky's response to this score is so inside the understated rhythms, the folk-tinged ambience, and piquant harmonies, that it took my breath away on both nights. But this score, just like the choreography that's inevitably associated with it, is almost inaccessible in creating an introverted landscape. It never reaches out for you, but you also don't disturb it and float seamlessly back out of that world when it's over. Therefore, the choreography seemed purposefully understated, using a more traditional dance vocabulary, and to some extent, underdeveloping parts of the tale.
But then much of the time, the story can still come through in emotional terms. In Ratmansky's opening choreography, Sergei's restlessness, the fact that he's alone, helps explain why he, all of a sudden, gives up on his fiancee for this new woman, Olga: she has two legs. She's probably the first woman he's seen in five years of fighting. Simply, he sees her before he sees his fiancee, and Ratmansky's opening characterization of this restlessness helps to explain things without a lot of pretext.
As regards stage images, I particularly enjoyed the quarter-turn pivots with one arm raised that open and close the ballet; the "confetti" image with Olga and the fiancee; Natalia resting her head in a kind of prayer, and many others.
Oh boy, could I not agree less with Apollinaire Scherr in that this score is match. As I've listened to this piece, I've always wondered what so many of the numbers might look like on stage, and some of them just scream for choreography. It's the story that's thorny; the music would light up like kindling. That we haven't gotten Chout or Le Pas d'Acier into the international repertoire is a big tragedy for Western culture.