Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake ****
English National Ballet, Coliseum, 3rd January 2019
Ballets blancs: ghostly wilis in Giselle; the Shades in Bayadère; snowflakes in Nutcracker; or here… swans. They are the great white scenes for ballerina and female corps – bourrée-ing on pointe, a dip, a balance, weaving lines of perfect symmetry. Tutus twinkling, they often emerge through a sea of dry ice, two dozen dancers in perfect unison. They’re a showcase for any corps de ballet. They’re also the barometer of a company’s health. When the classics are squeezed from programming, the first thing to suffer is usually the corps.
English National Ballet corps © Laurent Liotardo
Judging by this evening’s Swan Lake, English National Ballet is in the finest fettle. The lakeside corps was a vision of crisp synchronicity, moving – and even seeming to breathe – as one, tracing the perfect geometry of Lev Ivanov’s miraculous Act 2 choreography. Derek Deane’s 1997 production was conceived for “in the round” performances at the Royal Albert Hall, where ENB’s flight of swans swells to 60 – what a sight that must be. Restaged for conventional theatres in 2000, with swans reduced to the usual corps of 24, it’s a handsome, thoroughly traditional staging, worthy of regular revival.
Peter Farmer’s designs serve the ballet well. The greens and golds of Act 1 give the prince’s birthday celebrations a bucolic, peasant feeling, emphasised by the English National Ballet Philharmonic’s punch in the waltz. The lake scenes are a vision of moonlit blues. Only Act 3 slightly underwhelms, a rather down-at-heel court where the window showing the vision of Odette is situated so low that she could easily go unnoticed.
James Streeter (Rothbart) and Jurgita Dronina (Odile)
© Laurent Liotardo
Tchaikovsky’s score was urgently paced by Gavin Sutherland, ever attentive to the dancers’ needs and prepared to pull on the reins where necessary. Woodwinds solos were sensitively shaped and the brass ensured that orchestral climaxes raised the Coliseum roof.
Isaac Hernández danced a youthful Siegfried, with boyish charm. It helps that Deane gives him an Act 1 solo – set to the Andante sostenuto from the score’s usual pas de trois. Too often, the prince can be a cardboard figure, with little sense of inner turmoil. Not here, where Hernández phrasing was poetic. His huge leaps in Act 3 rocketed into the atmosphere. I preferred Jurgita Dronina’s Odile to her Odette. Rothbart’s wicked daughter suited her rather imperious approach and there was an icy cut to her fouettés. A compact dancer, her Odette was always neatly turned; it’s just that I never believed in her plight.
Jurgita Dronina (Odette) and Isaac Hernández (Siegfried)
James Streeter’s hawkish Rothbart swept the stage effectively, flailing his outsized wings and eating up the yards. Daniel McCormick impressed in a well danced Act 1 pas de trois and the national dances of Act 3 burst with character, from the boisterous Czardas to a dashing Polonaise.
© Laurent Liotardo
But in an evening of fine dancing, it’s those swans that leave the greatest impression. Deane interpolates the Andante con moto from the Pas de six into the final scene – the same number that Liam Scarlett slipped into Act 4 in his new version for the Royal Ballet last season. It gives Siegfried and Odette a moment of tender, passionate reconciliation before leaping to their deaths, when the swan corps rounds on Rothbart voraciously as his powers are destroyed. A fine evening by the lake.