Unlike Tchaikovsky’s ballets, the music to Stravinsky’s is more regularly heard in public than the ballets themselves are seen on stage.
A trio of works in the same programme – Petrushka, The Firebird and Le Baiser de La Fee – is therefore a choice combination.
But this BRB presentation also gives us the first two in their original choreography (Mikhail Fokine) and, in the case of Petrushka, with the original designs (Alexandre Benois).
We are almost at the birth in The Firebird’s sets and costumes, too, as these were updated by Natalia Goncharova in 1926 from Leon Bakst’s originals.
So much for history. But what history! – Stravinsky the iconoclast, Fokine flinging ballet into the 20th century and stage pictures that revive images of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the creative ferment of modernism.
Michael Corder is but the latest to choreograph Le Baiser (The Fairy’s Kiss) and he cuts a stately pattern, regally trailed by Elisha Willis (Fairy), Joseph Caley (Young Man), Nao Sakuma (Bride) and Andrea Tredinnick (Mother).
Ms Tredinnick also replaced the indisposed Gaylene Cummerfield as Tsarevna in The Firebird, in which Carol-Anne Millar as the scorching avian seemed discomfited when not actually airborne.
This young company was at its most reverential in Petrushka (Jamie Bond in the title role; Ambra Vallo and Robert Gravenor the other puppets), its most refined in Le Baiser and its most frenzied in The Firebird.
It says much for the last-named that, even with somewhat dated corps de ballet routines, it can still set the pulse racing.
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