delibes

Still on Amazon, I think ? I found this thought-provoking in Solway's book: ' To Nureyev, talent was destiny,[ ... ] to Bruhn talent was a burden.' And Fleming Flindt's remark about Bruhn: ' He once said to me, ' One thing I'm very good at is getting offstage fast '. That was a typical Bruhn remark'. I am a bit puzzled by this as my impression is that Solway had actually more quotes from Nureyev's colleagues than Kavanagh. Her interviews with Baryshnikov, Martins, Seymour, Tallchief, Mason and Kolpakova, are very indepth and give a kind of daytime reality to everything else. As an American she wrote with a lot of interest about the Soviet trials and tributions of Nureyev's family after he defected (and of his death sentence) . Perhaps as an American she was stronger on interviews with Russian dancers now in America, while Kavanagh is stronger on the European side where his myth is more powerful. I quite like the American cold water style. I was just hoping that after so many years Kavanagh's book would have much more that was different and significant to offer. Anyway, enough already.

I seem to be one of the few people not delighted with Julie Kavanagh's biography, which appears to my eye to have too many hard facts wrong and too much romantic waffle. I am sorry to say that I got more and more annoyed by it. I have Diane Solways's version already and wasn't sure I would get this too, but took the plunge as it is 9 years on. Well, though I enjoyed the beginning about the childhood and early Russia stories very much (the school photographs are really delightful) I started feeling that I had to check one biography against the other as I noticed more and more mistakes. The first mistake that someone else has already pointed out was turning the famous piano professor Yakov Flier into a violinist who she called the joint winner of the Tchaikovsky competition with Van Cliburn. Apart from her getting the instruments wrong, the cause celebre was that Van Cliburn was NOT a joint winner, but the outright one because he was not Russian. So, Nureyev's inspired reaction to Flier's violin -playing, as told, can't be right. Either the author has got it wrong or the person who told her has. This is a corker of a mistake quite early on. Another corker is that Nureyev's teacher Pushkin died in 1970, not in 1971 as she says, and in that chapter of 1970 to 71 several other things get very muddled. For example, she said that after having some bad US reviews for his Van Dantzig modern ballet at theRoyal Ballet, Nureyev felt driven back to classical with staging the Australian Ballet ' Don Quixote '; i.e. she is reading his thoughts. Yet, the Australian Ballet website states that the ' Don Quixote ' occured before he danced the Van Dantzig work in America. On 2nd March 1970 he did the premiere of the Danzig in London and 6 more performances (this is in my Royal Ballet book), by 28th March 1970 he had rehearsed, staged and opened DQ in Australia and did some performances in April (this on the AB site), and then he flew to America (incredible man! ) to dance with the Royal Ballet from 21st April to the end of May. Kavanagh said that he got bad reviews on that US trip. Solway said that he got some of the best reviews of his life, but on the other hand she omitted the Australian DQ completely. This incompleteness and muddle is disappointing particularly as Ashton was retiring that year, which must have been a watershed for Nureyev at the Royal Ballet (funny that Kavanagh is Ashton's biographer too, but she only mentions that in passing). It is an example where I feel the facts are shaky inside Kavanagh's somewhat wordy assertions. I was surprised that the tragic and now wellknown fact that Lynn Seymour had undergone an abortion in order to be able to premiere MacMillan's ' Romeo and Juliet ' at Covent Garden, but then lost the premiere to Margot and Rudy for box-office reasons is not told in Kavanagh's account, considering that Nureyev must have been, one supposes, very distressed. He was by all accounts nearly as close to Seymour as Fonteyn. Sylvie Guillem is another ballerina very close to Nureyev who has a quite remote presence in this biography. Kavanagh says that Nureyev kept her photograph by his bed but she takes just one paragragh to tell of her scandalous departure to the Royal Ballet. If you check with Solway, Twyla Tharp was making her first work in Paris, and intended Sylvie as the central dancer, which was a considerable statement of Nureyev's modernising force in the Paris Opera, yet in Kavanagh Tharp is not mentioned at all. Very strange. Also which act of ' La Bayadere ' are the Shades ? I have only seen Act 3 for Shades, but she has Act 4 twice and then changes to Act 3. The Kirov's French impresario was Georges Soria, not Sorio. Also where is an update on the Nureyev Foundations in Europe and the USA. Diane Solway's book ended with a highly intriguing epilogue about how they spent more on legal fees than giving money to Nureyev's intended recipients, and quarreled between themselves. By the way, the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation website does not list Nureyev Australian performances ( ! ) and the Rudolf Nureyev Dance Foundation in the US website cites Nureyev's death as 6th January 1992 ! (It should be 1993) Who can you trust ? These people are Julie Kavanagh's sponsors, and she has only listed what they say on their websites about their achievements. In the end it is down to personal taste, but I was not expecting the two books to be so similar. There is no point in buying the Kavanagh if you have read the Solway one, unless you want to know even more about Nureyev's affairs (Solway usually listed names but was not bothered to interview them, which seems about right when you see what they tell Kavanagh sometimes.) Neither of them, recounting so many details, important and unimportant, is really in tune in style with Nureyev's personality, which was very terse (a couple of my favourites are' Chicken dinner, chicken performance ', ' not entrechat six, entrechat piss'. ) I think that Solway reported the story excellently and straightforwardly (very exciting defection report) and she gave more than Kavanagh has on what other dancers like Baryshnikov, Peter Martins and Irina Kolpakova thought of Nureyev. These opinions interest me more when I am watching Nureyev videos than the extra lovers. Also Cecil Beaton was a great diarist, very funny to read on the New York social scene and Solway has some excellent examples. Kavanagh was fortunate to have Solway's book to go on for research. She even uses Solway's chapter heading ' The beatnik and the prince ' for one of hers. The Solway biog is more ' definitive ', if by that you mean the one you will look up in future when you need to know something. Maybe Kavanagh's is more romantically written, more in tune with celebrity and the mythical Rudy. By the way it appears from Amazon that not one Nureyev biog has failed to have good reviews, even the really dreadful ones.

I don't think it has been mentioned that the Royal Ballet principal dancer Zenaida Yanowsky is one of three dancing siblings; her sister Nadia Yanowsky is with the Staatsoper Ballett Berlin and her brother Yuri Yanowsky is a Principal with the Boston Ballet. Their father was a scientist who had wanted to be a dancer, according to an interview a while ago with Yanowsky at the Ballet Association. Long ago Asaf and Sulamith Messerer were the Bolshoi Ballet's star couple. Natalia Bessmertova has a sister, or had, dancing in the Bolshoi. There are also Andris and Ilze Liepa whose father was Maris. Dance in the family seems to be relatively common in the USSR, perhaps for economic reasons, but I guess they also proved they had enough talent to become real stars as well in very competitive times. I know nothing about the Kirov - are there siblings there? In Cuba I think that the leading artists José Manuel, Joel and Alihaydé Carreno are closely related, brothers and half-sister possibly, and that Lazarro Carreno, one of Alicia Alonso's main partners (a very elegant man - I saw a photo in which his physique and face were very like Anthony Dowell's), is their uncle. And I think that Yatsen Chang who is English National's virtuoso is brother to the splendid Lienz Chang who I remember fondly from a performance of Romeo and Juliet with ENB a while ago.

Marga, excuse me, but Nina Alovert writes in 2003 when she first saw Ms Makhalina dance it was 1987 and she had been by then in the US for 10 years and had not seen any Russian dancers. Obviously since then she has been much more involved as you say. quote: Я увидела Махалину в 1987 году, когда впервые после 10-летнего перерыва (я эмигрировала в Америку, а театр 10 лет не приезжал на гастроли) смотрела спектакли Кировского балета в Чикаго. I saw Mahalina in 1987, when the first time after a 10-year break (I emigrated to America and for 10 years the company didn't come over on tour) I watched performances by the Kirov Ballet in Chicago. I will edit to change 90s to 80s, you are quite right.

Thanks for the appreciation but it is easily more interesting homework for my Russian class than agriculture or education infrastructure. As an appendix to the article by Nina Alovert on Vinogradov I have found an article (also in Russki Bazar) she did in 2003 about Julia Makhalina's controversial rise under the very same VInogradov. She introduces Ms Makhalina as the "brightest star" to emerge from Russian or indeed world ballet for 30 years. Ms Makhalina's affair with Vinogradov is acknowledged - his open 'fondness' for her, her love for him described as resembling the love that Balanchine's favourite ballerinas had for a creatively stimulating older man, though hers attracted far more vicious rumour and overt gossip. Ms Makhaina is described as Vinogradov's soulmate or muse perhaps in reviving a moribund Kirov in the late Seventies, a tall, modern, Western-type ballerina with her extended horizontal-vertical legs and "western" jump, which Ms Alovert says no other classical Russian-schooled ballerina could do. What throws a quite puzzling light on Vinogradov's position as chief is how his favourite was treated so openly badly, and even criminally, by fans and colleagues - in a gala performance of Swan Lake in 1992 she was apparently showered from the gallery with "besoms" (bunches of twigs, I suppose), rather than flowers. She gamely picked them up and brandished them at the audience. Ms Alovert's partiality for Ms Makhalina (the writer apparently left Russia to settle in America in the 80s [amended with apologies from 90s] and had seen no Russian dancers for a decade before the Kirov finally made the trip again) makes for an account that may interest London fans. When the Kirov toured to London with 'Rite of Spring' Ms Makhalina, the original Chosen One in this Nijinsky recreation, was substituted by Daria Pavlenko. Ms Pavlenko is described bluntly by Ms Alovert as a "mediocre soloist who for some reason the directors rated as a star". In the event, Ms Alovert implies that Ms Pavlenko was not well enough prepared to do the premiere in London, and Julie Makhalina was summoned at a day's notice from Russia to save the show. Ms Alovert says possibly Vinogradov pushed the very young Makhalina too fast to allow her to mature and properly prepare new roles, but that he felt that no young dancer of talent could be truly evaluated unless they were seen in leading roles on stage. It seems that Ms Makhalina was too forward-thinking a girl to avoid the brickbats of the conservative establishment, and she then fell foul of the 'Claque', which according to Ms Alovert is subject to mafia-type bribing to hasten or end the rise of a new star (Moscow it still goes strong, apparently, though less so now in St P). The bribes are fascinating; clacqueurs long above all to become involved in their idols' lives and the mother of one star would send privileged fans to do her potato shopping. Julia's mother was told at the stage door by some clacqueurs that they would fix it so she did not dance, and it sounds quite unlike London practices. Under the new management Ms Makhalina was ejected from her classical roles & only cast when other dancers were injured. She married and divorced twice very quickly, and had a nervous breakdown a few years ago, but recovered & set up a show of her own with contemporary choreographers. I do not know if she has now retired but I wonder if there is a Russian equivalent song to "don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington" . Another of Vinogradv's discoveries Diana Vishneva told Ms Alovert in another Russki Bazar interview last year about her strangely isolated position in the Mariinsky now, and how after years of being refused Swan Lake under the Vaziev management she finally danced it in the Mariinsky, and only one person, Uliyana Lopatkina, went up to her afterwards. Russia sure does sound like a cold place to be a ballerina in. I have found these interviews by typing in Russian but as Carbro said some entertaining Google translations are available once you have located them.

In an article in Izvestia, the Russian newspaper, on September 17 [www.izvestia.ru/culture/article3108403) an extract of the memoirs of Oleg Vinogradov, former Kirov Ballet director, gave an extraordinarily dramatic and personal account of the reasons for his dismissal in clouds of accusations of corruption in 1995. I have taken the liberty of translating this amazing account. It is long, but (in the light of Mr Litvinenko's sad fate in London, to say the least) well worth reading. This is the introduction by the Izvestia correspondent: In August People's Artist of the USSR choreographer Oleg Vinogradov reached 70 years of age. Today he lives in the USA, but in the past, for no less than two decades, he led the Mariinsky ballet company. The story of his exit from the Mariinsky is full of mysteries. The chief balletmaster was found at fault both for the departure of soloists abroad and and for his excessive attention to a rising young female dancer, and further for his proclamation of the Mariinsky as being a choreographic museum. The climax of Vinogradov's relations with his detractors was an uprising against his criminal (sic) activities. As read from the official pronouncement: "according to the fact of his receiving bribes in the sum of $10,000 (US) from the Canadian impresario John Cripton on his signing a contract of cooperation", the choreographer was arrested directly in his office, but after three days they released him, without any charges having been put. Twelve years later Oleg Vinogradov has finally recounted that dramatic period of his life. The story, entitled "Three times within a hair's-breadth of death", appears in his autobiographical book 'Confession of a balletmaster", which the publishing house AST-press and editor Ekaterina Belova, is preparing for publication. Today 'Izvestia' publishes a fragment of this ballet whodunnit. [There follows this extract:] "After the appointment of Valery Gergiev as chief director of the Kirov theatre, towards the mid 1990s, I had misgivings that there would also be major changes in the leadership of the ballet company, not for the better. We were quite reasonably spending the money allocated to us, not exceeding the budget, and our tours brought in fairly large profits - while we didn't receive any state subsidies. Along with that, the ballet company had its own requirements which couldn't be bought out of the theatre budget; to buy a set or two of special floor coverings, so as to dance comfortably and safely on it, to pay for an operation on an injured artist abroad, etc. I tried to resolve this sort of problem through official channels, but invariably got a refusal. In order to guarantee the life of our ballet company, the impresario John Cripton advised us to set up a special fund for the worst-case scenario. With the impresario's agreement we set up a fund from his additional fee as specified in the basic contract. This fund could be a reserve for any type of situation - but its money would not belong to the Mariinsky Theatre. John Cripton opened an account with a Geneva bank, and only he could deposit money in it by means of a fixed code. How much and what kind of money was lying in it, I didn't, in essence, look into. The Mariinsky Theatre received the sums agreed in the contract, but they vanished noone knows where - it goes without saying, not on our needs! Apart from fees (true, these were quite high) the ballet got nothing. With Valery Gergiev's appearance, the Mariinsky Opera ate up more and more money. For new costumes, we were forced to buy essential materials abroad (paying for them out of our fund), which Cripton, as it were, was donating to the theatre. Yes, he was prepared to pay large amounts of money to the ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre, but not to the opera, with which he had no connection! I do not know how and why, but two of our soloists "broke" Cripton and found out about the Geneva account. The soloists demanded money, threatening and blackmailing us. Seeing the danger of the gathering situation, I proposed to Cripton that we'd tell the responsible agencies about everything, but he did not agree, and then we decided to give money to two of our soloists, in order to avoid scandal. Cripton got part of the money together in cash, but the majority was in cheques on his Geneva bank (I naturally did not have my own Geneva bank account - who would open it for me then?). So as to insure myself against major unpleasantness, I switched on a concealed videocamera and recorded the entire process of the transfer of the money with detailed commentaries. Cripton did not know about the video, nor the artists, who made little of the received money (around a million dollars!). Evidently, the threats and blackmail had got on Cripton's nerves, and he decided to get shot of both the artists and, not very surprisingly, me. I did not know at all what Cripton was thinking, but he turned to law and order agencies (or the "agencies" themselves came to him), and he gave a highly contrary account of the situation, accusing me and the theatre's director A F Mal'kov of receiving bribes (it's true, later on Cripton withdrew this). Scandal erupted. I, Mal'kov and the Mariinsky Theatre all appeared compromised. Evidently, the intention to show the spectre of my obliteration achieved its goal. Cripton gave contradictory interviews, in which he said things that had not happened: but he also played a leading role in it and he exited with a spotted reputation. The ballet company, of course, was in shock. I hired a lawyer, and after carefully investigating the essence of the matter, he said that it was very hard to prosecute me since the moneys belonged only to Cripton. The representative of the public prosecution office of the Admiralteisky district of Saint-Petersburg, T A Moskalenko, also took an objective position on the matter. She painstakingly tested all the evidence and, on looking at the video recordings, held a meeting with our two soloists. The final outcome was that on the orders of the public prosecutor, the artists, all in all, handed the money over to the theatre, where it disappeared without trace into the opera stack. Noone gained anything, unless you count the shame that collapsed on us. The investigation could not prove anything, but through all of it threaded a decided bias. There was a sudden fire in section 6 of the OBEP building, where the investigation was going on, and it's claimed that all documents relating to my "case" were burned. The investigator in charge of my "case", was discovered drunk in one of the restaurants where he was evidently celebrating an expected victory, and was dismissed from his job. I held on for a long time any way I could. I was worried for our ballet company, which I had involuntarily disgraced. My enemies were celebrating! They could not at that time fire me, but they neutered my authority in all matters and sidelined me from normal work process in the theatre. Eventually I broke, and decided to chuck it in. Whenever I was free, I flew off to Washington. But not to return would be the equivalent of admitting guilt, and it was just what my illwishers were waiting for. I decided not to do this, and returning to Petersburg, I got down to rehearsing my ballet Romeo and Juliet. A week later, at one of the rehearsals, I suddenly felt terrible; I could not breathe, and I only just made it into my office where I passed out. When I regained consciousness, emergency doctors were bringing me round. Not understanding very well what had happened to me, I asked them to take me not to the Sverdlovsky hospital but to the War-Medicine Academy, where I was known. After detailed tests, the doctors gave me the diagnosis: a micro-infarct, a small heart attack - and prescribed hospitalisation. However, after two days I was feeling absolutely fine, and signed myself out of hospital. Returning to my office, I found on my telephone table, under the lamp, a strange object, to which at first I didn't pay much attention: it was slim, hard, wrapped in cloth, about the size of a match. Gently tearing off the cloth covering, of some kind of netting, I discovered inside a glass ampoule, smashed in two... After three days I had the answer: inside the ampoule had been a special gas that reacted with a heat source after 30-40 minutes and caused death, imitating heart attack. But how then was I still alive? Well, because the rehearsal began in daytime, and I had not switched on the lamp - so the heat source was absent. Secondly, on the ampoule it said the period of validity which had already expired. Someone had made a poor-quality purchase... I carried on working, but evidently the agents of my elimination succeeded. Two weeks later, in the doorway of my own flat, I was attacked by two masked bandits. I miraculously saved myself, throwing off one of them and managing to slam the door closed... My patience was at an end. I told the director that I did not want any more to tempt fate, and the following day I flew to America.... Possibly my mistake was in that I clung on too long to my job? Probably I should have gone straight after Gergiev's arrival, but actually I myself had assisted his arrival, if we take the instance when in 1988 some question had arisen about a choice between him and Evgeni Kolobov for the job of chief director of the Kirov Theatre, and I was sure that we would work with Gergiev! You know, until then we had had an excellent understanding with him in our combined productions... Or was the mistake in the acceptance by the company of Farouk Ruzimatov after his departure for American Ballet Theatre? I had all the grounds for them not to take him on! But I was thinking of him, not of my own claims.... I've frequently been mistaken because of my need to be liked by people. I entrusted literally everything to others - money, documents, cars, by which I led them into temptation and of course consequently lost a great deal.... But you know, now and then you believe what you want to!"

Thanks indeed, drb, for your trouble. Most illuminating. It is clear that "the gold medal" at Varna should generally be read as "a gold medal". Also Martine van Hamel was 21 when she won a 'junior' gold in 1966, which is not very young. When I heard Ivan Vasiliev won the last Varna junior section at 17, I assumed 'junior' meant pre-company level. It is another world.

According to the Varna-ibc website, when they started in 1964 they were the first professional ballet competition in the world - Moscow, Paris etc all followed after their example. There seems to have been senior and junior sections from the start, but as the gold medal women we know about were all born about the same time, it looks as if at least 4 golds were awarded in the senior section, which I find (as I say, I am ignorant) confusing. Other years, including the 1st year when Vasiliev and Sizova won, they seem to have had only one for each sex if you go googling about. There is no list of prizewinners on the site, but there is apparently a book about Varna by John Gregory. Does anyone have the book with the explanation? Otherwise, I find myself wondering if ballerinas have remembered their careers correctly. It says by the way that only one Grand Prix has ever been awarded, which was to Vladimir Vasiliev in year 1. So Baryshnikov, Ananiashvili, Makarova, Guillem, Platel, did not quite cut it to the Grand Prix in their years. Is Varna still the 'best' competition? How do they all stack up?

From the Jhones thread, we have found at least four female gold medallists in Varna 1965: Loipa Araujo, Natalia Bessmertnova, Natalia Makarova and Martine van Hamel. I know nothing about competitions and am confused. Is there an explanation for the multiple gold medals? Thanks.

I have Ballet National de Cuba books & programmes stating that the Cuban women's medal sweep at Varna was 64-66. Araujo won gold in 65, Aurora Bosch in 66. Other Cuban female medals: 64 Mirta Pla silver, Josefina Mendez bronze (the year I believe Alla Sizova won gold for USSR, Vasiliev won male gold). 65 Araujo gold, 3 Cuban silvers: Aurora Bosch, Mirta Pla & Josefina Mendez. 66 gold Aurora Bosch, silver Mirta Pla. Arnold Haskell wrote as a result of Cuba's four female jewels. Can anyone explain the multiplicity of golds at Varna 65?

Can any competition veterans out there explain how Bessmertnova, Makarova & Araujo all won the women's gold at Varna in 1965?

Loipa Araujo was gold medal at Varna in 65, I think, the year there was a Cuban women clean sweep. Also on Youtube you can see her mysterious Black Swan fragment in a compilation from Moscow IBC.

Odette/Odile makes or breaks a Swan Lake, and I find it far more renewing and interesting when an O/O tells me something colossal and terrible about being imprisoned, rather than if she makes a more or less aesthetic swan. As long as her 'birdiness' is drawing me away from any 'reality' into the super-hyper-unreality where this bird-woman thing makes metaphorical sense, that's fine. But she doesn't have to 'be' a swanny maiden for the prison metaphor to work. I'm thinking of why above all the perhaps 80 O/Os I've seen (live) in 20 years, Uliana Lopatkina and Tamara Rojo affected me on an entirely separate scale than any others, 'great' though many of them are at swanlike beauty or classical delicacy or aerialness etc. Lopatkina & Rojo are wholly unalike, though they have both taken their technique to that rare level where they merely use the steps to express the ideas the ballet gives to them. Rojo is all music, a vibrantly feminine, tender, and very 'present' vision that comes and goes in different guises as her Siegfried dreams her to be - she is about as 'human' an Odette as I have ever seen. She is sexually charged in both disguises, and there is real horror in seeing such a beautiful woman enslaved, and a real urgency in one's desire for her to be released. I suppose it's a modern kind of horror. Lopatkina is elemental, she doesn't come across as a sensate woman you might meet, but something more like the mythical soul of a nation. Her Odette seems to be resigned, her feelings muted, after centuries of enchainment. Sexual attraction, trust, faith, all these things went long, long ago. She is like one of Michelangelo's stone slaves, a ravishing form struggling in vain out of cold stone. It matters with Rojo who her Sigfried is, because that is how she fashions her performance. It really does not matter with Lopatkina, because she would represent the permanent suffering of the damned whoever the current villain was. They both fashion their Odiles with equal care, Rojo flamboyantly to dazzle, Lopatkina, on at least one occasion, to repel. Either way, the message about evil is irresistible and neckprickling. Rojo's finale is heartbreaking because she is lucky enough to have the Royal Ballet version to dance, and one's tears just pour; Lopatkina, who is made for tragedy, is saddled with the implausible Soviet 'happy' resolution which she never appears to believe in. I wonder if Lopatkina will ever get the right ending for the story she tells in her Swan Lake, or whether she will remain trapped in artificial optimism for all time.

Anatoly Iksanov, general director of the bolshoi Theatre, gave an interesting interview to Interfax on July 20: I translate the general points he made - my translation is checked with the Bolshoi Theatre: 1. The political chill between Russia and England is not affecting the London tour; art and culture traditionally survive even colder tensions. The London tour is very large in scale, with proper programming for 3 weeks, including 10 ballets. The company will arrive in London July 29 (tomorrow), give the Corsaire premiere July 30. 2. The next season will contain even more foreign tours (both opera and ballet) than the current one with visits to Berlin, Amsterdam, Turin and Milan, and most important a tour to Paris. However, closer to their heart will be an increase in internal Russian tours, resurrecting a 'Bolshoi-Russia' project of domestic touring which had lapsed for many years, but which (eg most recently the visits to Novosibirsk and Rostov on Don) was intended to make renewed efforts to show Russia's chief theatre around the whole country. 3. To a question about the way that foreign tours became "rewards" for good behaviour in Soviet times, and how "intrigues" invariably arose concerning who went and who stayed, and who got the foreign fees and privileges, Iksanov replied that it was utterly changed now. Foreign tours, domestic tours, house performances were all treated as a routine part of artists' life. There was not the slightest "hullabaloo" any more about touring. This was partly explained by changes in fees, which meant artists earned as much at home as they did abroad, but naturally there would always be more home performances than foreign. 4. The next season's premieres were 2 opera and 3 ballet - chief interest in a new 'Queen of Spades' production conducted by the pianist/conductor Mikhail Pletnev and directed by famous theatre director (but opera debutant) Valerii Fokin, also a new 'Carmen', reverting to the original score with spoken dialogue, conducted by Yuri Temirkanov, the theatre's new chief guest conductor, and directed by English opera director David Pountney. The ballet premieres would be Flemming Flindt's 'The Lesson', on October 28 2007, a Johan Kobborg production of 'La Sylphide', and Alexei Ratmansky's new staging of the epic 'Flames of Paris', scheduled (like the Class Concert premiere) for the end of the season, July 3 2008. 5. The renovation of the Bolshoi Theatre was proving problematic, it is now "at the very least" [po menshei mere] six months behind. Although officially the theatre opens in October 2008, it will not be fully open to the public until well into 2009. The fabric of the building and foundations were far worse than originally realised, about 60 percent of the entire area proved to be crumbling once work began. New bricks to the old specifications were being made to reinforce the old masonry. Inside the stage, this generated a large new complication, since the old scenery girders lay on the old walls, but these walls could no longer be used. Hence a unique metal carcass is being constructed within the stage walls, not touching, but independently supporting the girders. Workers are working around the clock in three shifts to get it done. 6. Once the Main Stage reopened, the repertory would not be the same as the New Stage's, it would be a mixture of the great productions that could not properly be done in the New Stage and new productions for the Main Stage. 7. Iksanov was asked about something that was "no secret", but rather very "well known", that a large part of the Russian public and critics were complaining that the Bolshoi Ballet was now getting carried away with rehashing [perekraivat'] classical ballet too much. In a short final answer he said, "I absolutely disagree with that. We are not rehashing classical ballet, we are looking at it with the eyes of the 21st century audience." There is also an Ismene Brown article in the Telegraph about the Wheeldon ballet and some points made above, including the interesting maybe sad information that Ratmansky has renewed his contract only to October 2008: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml...btballet123.xml

Plenty of English reaction to Mozart Dances which was conducted in London by Jane Glover with the Academy of St-Martin in the Fields orchestra. Ismene Brown (Telegraph) loved it - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml...btmorris106.xml Clement Crisp (Financial Times) loved it - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b2d7e622-2b59-11dc...0b5df10621.html Judith Mackrell (Guardian) 5/5 stars - http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/dance/r...2119869,00.html Debra Craine (Times) 4/5 stars - http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...icle2032361.ece Sarah Frater (Evening Standard) 4/5 stars - http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/show...viewId=23403034 Zoe Anderson (Independent) liked it - http://arts.independent.co.uk/theatre/revi...icle2740528.ece Unnamed (?Jennie Gilbert, Sunday Independent?) quite liked it - http://arts.independent.co.uk/theatre/revi...icle2745645.ece Luke Jennings (Observer) didn't like it - http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/stor...2121110,00.html