One week from this coming Friday, San Francisco Ballet (SFB) will conclude this year’s season with a complete performance of the four-act ballet Swan Lake. This is the first of the three full-evening ballets for which the music was provided by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It was first performed at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on March 4, 1877 with choreography in four acts by Julius Reisinger. That premiere was not particularly well received, but it remained in repertoire for six years and 41 performances.
SFB corps de ballet for Swan Lake (photograph by Erik Tomasson, courtesy of SFB)
However, “Swan Lake as we know it” had its origins at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg on February 8, 1895. The choreography was shared by Marius Petipa (Acts 1 and 3) and Lev Ivanov (Acts 2 and 4). SFB performed the ballet for the first time on September 27, 1940 with choreography by William Christensen. Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer Helgi Tomasson created his own staging. However, the performance of Act 2 basically retains Ivanov’s version. Similarly, the so-called “Black Swan pas de deux” in Act 3 retains Petipa’s choreography. However, that pas de deux is folded into a more extended divertissement that Tomasson created. Also, for those that enjoy the grandeur of this ballet, the corps of swans consists of 30 dancers.
For those unfamiliar with the scenario, it involves a young prince, Siegfried, who is being pressured by his mother to get married. Siegfried procrastinates by going hunting with his friend Benno after seeing a flock of swans flying overhead. They come to the lake of the ballet’s title, where Siegfried discovers that the swans are actually young women transformed by the sorcerer Rothbart. Siegfried falls in love with one of them, Odette, and pledges to break the spell and marry her. There is a fair amount of variation in how the plot then unfolds. However, the usual resolution of the tale is that the spell is only broken by the death of both Odette and Siegfried, who are united in Heaven.
Back when I was first exercising my skills in writing about ballet in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the late Sixties, I had the opportunity to cover a performance of the second act of Swan Lake performed by the Boston Ballet for the delegates attending a convention of the American Psychiatric Association. The program was introduced by Dance Magazine critic Doris Hering. Knowing her audience, she observed that any young man having “mother issues” about marriage who then goes off and comes back with a swan is clearly ripe for psychiatric analysis! Personally, I find it preferable to put psychiatry aside and approach the narrative with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”
The SFB performances of Swan Lake will take place in the War Memorial Opera House at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 29, Saturday, April 30, Friday, May 6, and Saturday, May 7, at 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 1, Saturday, May 7, and Sunday May 8, and at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 3, Wednesday, May 4, and Thursday, May 5. (That’s a total of ten performances over the course of a little more than a week.) The run time is about two hours and 40 minutes with two twenty-minute intermissions. The Web page for this production includes a hyperlink for purchasing tickets online. Tickets may also be purchased at the box office, which is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. Purchases may also be made by calling 415-865-2000.
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