I have just seen the second performance this evening, with Renata Shakirova as Parasha, Philip Stepin as Yevgeny and the indestructible Vladimir Ponomarev as Peter the Great.
The choreography was often perfunctory and the music is pleasant Soviet style, but unexciting. I longed for Prokofiev or Shostakovich to add a bit of sparkle and danger in the orchestra.
The production used all the resources of the Maryinsky 2. The flood scene was quite spectacular with flapping cloths and girls from the corps de ballet performing a kind of Loie Fuller veil dance, to represent the waves. There was significant use of video imaging, for example viewing the Bronze Horseman statue from every conceivable angle and making it look as though the statue was galloping into the audience. This drew significant appreciation from the audience.
There were several back projections of St. Petersburg in the early 1700s and in 1824, including a romantic shoreline view of Vasilievsky Island with a fishing boat and a small church on an offshore island - rather different from today's apartment blocks. These vistas also drew appreciative applause from the audience.
Neither principal had the weight to carry off the piece. Shakirova was bright and charming, but failed to project into the vast space of the Maryinsky 2. Stepin performed the virtuoso elements of the role well, but lacked the maturity and strength of character to convey the mad scenes convincingly. Unfortunately my eye was drawn away from his desperate emotings, by the cavorting of the Bronze Horseman video projections. I longed for a great actor-dancer, such as Rudolf Nureyev or Igor Kolb, to do justice to this role.
Overall I am not sure that this ballet is a very satisfying evening in the theatre, unless it has two great principals to pull it off. The applause petered out after the first curtain call, perhaps reflecting the rather lukewarn impression the evening had made.
The Fountain of Bakhchisarai earlier in the week with Kondaurova as Zarema fared slightly better, although she did not measure up to Lopatkina's towering interpretation in the 1990s.
