The bickering Bolshoi

Corruption claims, smear campaigns and artistic stagnation have dogged the Bolshoi in recent years. The ballet company hopes a magnificent renovation of its Moscow theatre will revive its fortunes. DAN MCLAUGHLIN pays a visit

GOLD LEAF gleams anew around the auditorium, rich silk tapestries shimmer again on the walls and countless chandeliers are being set tinkling back into place as Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre finally prepares to reopen after a painstaking, and often painful, six-year renovation.

The €500 million overhaul will restore the theatre to its 19th-century glory, and includes enough 21st-century technology to satisfy the most demanding director, but some performers and critics fear it will not cure the most serious ills at the heart of the Bolshoi.

Corruption claims have dogged a renovation that has run 16 times over budget and several years late; Bolshoi ballet stars have become embroiled in lurid scandals; and a string of high-profile rows, sackings and resignations has reinforced the theatre’s reputation for poisonous intrigue.

But when the Bolshoi opens its doors in October, its bosses hope the beauty on display will banish darker thoughts.

The auditorium has been returned to its original violin shape, and fine wooden panels and delicate mouldings have replaced the shoddy concrete and plaster that were used to patch up the theatre during Soviet times, and which destroyed its acoustics in the process. Experts say the auditorium will once more act like a huge, resonating musical instrument, amplifying the sound of the orchestra just as its creators intended when the building first opened, in 1825.

Master craftsmen have been brought to Moscow from around Russia to add the finishing touches. They include gilders who follow a centuries-old recipe involving egg white and vodka to ensure the lustre and longevity of the delicate gold leaf they lay in strips a tenth of a millimetre thick on the Bolshoi’s balconies and boxes.

Exquisite tapestries have been woven in a monastery outside Moscow by a small group of women with the rare skills to replicate the tsarist-era fabrics. Intricate mosaic floors and huge chandeliers have been restored and reassembled piece by tiny piece.

Above the toiling workers and the towers of scaffolding, the Muses are once more resplendent on the sky-blue panels of the Bolshoi’s ceiling, and on its facade, looking towards Red Square, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle has been replaced by the double-headed eagle of imperial Russia.

The renovation will also transform the working lives of the Bolshoi’s performers, giving the musicians a larger orchestra pit and providing modern backstage facilities for dancers and opera singers, who previously endured cramped changing rooms and queued to use a handful of showers and toilets.

German engineers are installing a state-of-the-art stage that can be raised and lowered hydraulically in separate sections and adapted to the different needs of opera and ballet performances. Officials say it will be the biggest stage in any of the world’s great historic theatres.

The huge project has doubled the useable space inside the Bolshoi to 80,000sq m, creating much-needed rehearsal and office areas as well as allowing for construction of a second, soundproofed auditorium below the main stage and within metres of a metro tunnel.

The gala reopening on October 28th will no doubt be a glittering occasion, but despite growing excitement about the completion of the work and the artists’ return after protracted exile in smaller premises, the chaos of the renovation project seemed to mirror disquiet inside the Bolshoi company. The troupe has long been riven by battles for control between competing cliques, and has been accused of losing direction and stagnating artistically while bureaucrats jostled for influence.

The former prima ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, who spectacularly fell out with the theatre in 2003 when it claimed she was too heavy to perform, said recently that corruption is spreading at the Bolshoi and dancers are pressured to attend parties with benefactors to further their careers.

In March, as the leading soloist Gennady Yanin appeared poised to become artistic director of the troupe, pictures of him in bed with other men were anonymously posted online and sent to thousands of e-mail addresses.

The blatant smear campaign ruined Yanin’s chances of promotion, and instead the Bolshoi turned to a former top dancer, Sergei Filin, to become its new artistic chief.

Filin last year echoed the thoughts of many experts when he said the Bolshoi company “needs to be completely reformed” in everything from training to repertoire to the exercise of “strict control over the dancers’ outside activities and work schedules”.

“It sometimes seems that no one there really wants to be a ballerina any more,” Filin told Raymond Stults, the long-time ballet and opera critic for the Moscow Times. “What they want is to find a rich husband or become a TV personality.” Stults says now that “there are probably power struggles and feuds going on throughout the Bolshoi”, with its huge staff of more than 2,000 people, including 220 dancers, many of them “prima donnas and other self-important, hypersensitive artistic types”. But while opera at the Bolshoi “needs to be completely rethought”, Stults says that Filin may be the man to turn the ballet company around. “He is very well liked among the dancers, knows the Bolshoi backwards and forwards after 20 years of dancing there and, with luck, can reshape the troupe . . . It’s an enormous job, but I think there is a very good chance he will succeed.”

The Bolshoi has seen a lot in its time, from the premiere of Tchaikovsky's Swan Laketo speeches by Lenin and Stalin, from Nazi bombs to the artistry of legendary ballerinas like Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya, and the current star Natalia Osipova.

With a history like this, Volochkova’s barbs and Yanin’s misfortune – and even the huge sums allegedly stolen from the renovation project – are unlikely to leave a lasting mark on the Bolshoi ahead of a reopening that some are calling a rebirth.

“The company was not really demoralised by all these stories and scandals,” says Katerina Novikova, a spokeswoman for the Bolshoi. “Everybody understands that all this is happening because the Bolshoi is great and famous, and many different forces would love to become its leaders,” she says.

“There is a saying in Russia: the dog barks but the caravan moves on.”

This is happening because the Bolshoi is great and famous, and many different forces would love to become its leaders