The taping in Perm of DON QUIXOTE
with Nina Anianashvili and Aleksandr
Fadayachev visiting from the Bolshoi
seems to have taken place around 1992,
about the time Nina first danced Kitri
with American Ballet Theater. This version has been around for a while
as a VHS
with weak visual quality which dampens
its three "darkest lit" tableaux - the garret
in which Don Q has been cloistered by
his family, the Inn and the Gypsy Camp.
Fortunately, all three tableaux are
beautifully lit in this MUCH sharper DVD re-issue. Of the many
versions of DON Q
around, the highest audience approval
seems to be for Baryshnikov's
staging, which superbly compacts the
gypsy camp followed by the
Dryads followed by the inn into a Second Act somewhat under thirty
minutes. This Act, which is spread thin across two separate middle
acts in the MUCH longer Kirov staging, is the weakest Act in the Perm
staging, which has to dawdle for five separate backdrops to come up
within a single act, the way the gypsy camp backdrop is entered and
exited the least flattering ****tion of the Perm choreography. However,
Acts I and III are absolutely fantastic in the Perm version, and this
role seems to allow Nina to ****ne in all her finest attributes, truly
a superlative
performance. What Perm, the famous
ballet school and theater of the Ukraine,
has to do with Georgia is unclear, but
Balanchine, who hailed from Georgia
certainly adopted a lot of what seems to
be a unique Perm style of choreography for his pioneering work with
with the NYC Ballet, and the Perm audience seems to welcome Nina as a
local, albeit a Georgian whose native land IS much closer to the
Ukraine then is either European Russia or the eastern "now
independent" former
ASSR lands of Kazakhstan
and Uzbekhistan, the birthplaces of
retired Kirov superstars Altynai
Asylmuratova and Faroukh Ruzimatov.
The way the Perm sets the opening
scene in Don Q's Garret and the
third act in the palace is TRULY glorious
to behold, and worth sitting through the relatively choppy second act
with its five
separate backdrops before an
intermission comes up. Seeing Nina's
fantastic performance and Fadaychev's
unusually flexible lumbar spine, which
seems to add a new dimension of
technical advancement to Basil's
air work compared with the relatively
straight back of the air work in the Kirov choreography we are used to
seeing in the west, as exemplified by Baryshnikov after his defection,
and probably taught to
Corella at ABT, are worth the price of the
DVD alone.HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Arrow
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