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Russian Ballets Clash by John Percival We all know, don’t we, that the London season by the Bolshoi Ballet at Covent Garden Opera House in 1956, a half century ago, introduced Soviet ballet to the west. Well, actually that isn’t true. Ignoring tours by small concert groups, there is the little fact that the Stanislavsky Ballet, also from Moscow, gave a season at the Chatelet Theatre, Paris, earlier that year, with Bourmeister’s Swan Lake and two mixed bills. And a specially composed company of dancers from the Bolshoi and the Kirov had actually arrived in Paris in 1954 under official auspices, only to find their season cancelled on political grounds. Anyway, the Bolshoi’s seasons in London, 1956, and New York, 1959, were followed in 1961 by the Kirov in Paris, London and New York, and both companies subsequently travelled occasionally to both sides of the Atlantic. But it is only more recently that they have become fairly regular vistors, and even so we thought ourselves lucky to see one or the other in any year. But now look at what is happening in Britain. We had the Kirov at Covent Garden last summer, and had been expecting the Bolshoi this year, but lo, we heard that the Hochhauser management was again bringing the Kirov to London. Never mind: Britain would still see the Moscow company because it had signed up for a four-week regional tour to Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham and Southampton in the spring. But then the Kirov Theatre’s artistic director Valery Gergiev fell out with the Hochhausers over the choice of repertoire. He wanted an all-Shostakovich season to celebrate the composer’s centenary, saying that it would be boring to do further runs of "Swan Lake" or "La Bayadère." So it was fixed for the Bolshoi opera and ballet to play Covent Garden in the summer. And now Gergiev has managed to get sponsorship for a Kirov opera and ballet season at the London Coliseum, opening in July and bringing three operas and two ballet programmes, all by Shostakovich, to overlap with the Bolshoi. Just one small problem; how are fans going to afford all this? Volume 4, No. 12
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