Swan Lake
Cork Opera House
★★★★★
Cork City Ballet’s portrayal of the undying romance of witchcraft and longing told in Swan Lake explains how this story has not only survived since the Mariinsky company’s staging of the ballet, in St Petersburg in 1895, but also defied variations and rewarded expectations.
Here, under Alan Foley’s crisp direction, full measure is given to the demands on its dancers, whose precision denies any suggestion of effort.
By now each performance of the work has to meet an audience already fuelled with more than 100 years of reputation. The triumph of this presentation is its sense of newness. Even for those who have seen the ballet before, the impression is of seeing it for the first time.
The narrative is simple in outline. Young Prince Siegfried seeks a woman to love; he finds one near a woodland lake – but, unfortunately, she is in the guise of a swan. This is Odette, living with her floating companions under a curse laid on them by Rothbart, a vengeful sorcerer. The spell can be broken only by an ever-faithful lover, a devotion the prince immediately promises.
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The sorcerer’s retaliation is to introduce Odile, his own version of a beautiful swan queen, to whose seductive disguise the prince succumbs, resulting in the fatal distress of Odette.
The story’s demand on credulity perhaps explains the theatrical failures of Swan Lake’s earlier performances, in stagings by the Bolshoi, in Moscow, in the 1870s and 1880s. It was the genius of the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and the choreography of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov that restored conviction to this most fervent demonstration of late-19th-century romantic imagination.
Certainly there remain some contradictions. It isn’t all pathos among the swans. Tchaikovsky’s robust rhythms allow considerable gaiety with a court jester and long interwoven sequences from a corps de ballet in Sylphide costumes.
No illusion is lost as these dancers become swans in feathery tutus, as there is a fine unity of identity and purpose in each of many divertissements.
The predicted thrill of Swan Lake is its spectacle, and this production, with Yury Demakov reproducing the original choreography of Petipa and Ivanov, gives these ranks of dancers a fluid cohesion.
The duty of Swan Lake, however, is to give its principals every opportunity to shine, and here they do as if under headlights. Shin Kurokawa’s Jester sets a standard of elevation matched and elongated by Tsetso Ivanov’s Siegfried and the Rothbart of Francesc Saura, electricity sparking from every sequin.
These elegant leaps and turns seem splendidly daring, but the emotional core of Swan Lake lies in the duets, the pas de deux of the prince and his two swans.
Responding to Tchaikovsky’s poignant score, Katerina Petrova extends her arms as Odile like an unholy angel, swirling into the famous fouettes with a hard-faced fury before sinking in renunciation as the betrayed Odette.
It is a marvellous double role in which she creates again the immortal magic that justifies all the gorgeous excesses of Swan Lake.
Swan Lake, staged by Cork City Ballet, is at Cork Opera House until Saturday, November 8th
