|
|
|
| | Arts Calendar / October 25 / Ballet |
|
|
|
|
|
 Ballet in two acts to music by Ilya Demutsky. 165 min (without intermission). Composer: Ilya Demutsky. Choreographer: Yuri Possokhov. Director, Designer and Author of Libretto: Kirill Serebrennikov. The new ballet score, based on motifs from the Lermontov novel A Hero of Our Time, was commissioned from the very young (32-year-old) Petersburg composer Ilya Demutsky who, though not averse to experiments, keeps to a fairly traditional musical language. However his acute interest in contemporary topics which finds reflection in his music, and his outlook immediately indicated that the ballet version of Lermontov’s Pechorin would in no way be a younger brother to the ‘Byronic’ Conrad in Le Corsaire. The fact that the ballet was to be produced by the avant-garde theatre director, Kirill Serebrennikov, was a further guarantee of this. In 2011 Serebrennikov filled his Bolshoi Theatre production of the opera The Golden Cockerel with contemporary allusions and four years later in ballet he demonstrated the unfailing relevance of the ideas and images in A Hero of Our Time for the present day. A Hero of Our Time is one of Serebrennikov’s favorite books. But however much one might love a book, not everyone is capable of bringing it alive in ballet. “I find it surprising no one thought of doing it before”, says Serebrennikov, “it is a quintessentially poetical and inwardly musical work. And where there is poetry there is ballet.”
Bolshoi Theater New Stage  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The virtual community for English-speaking expats and Russians
