172. Ballet at the Michailovsky Theater
The Michailovsky Theater was founded in 1833 and is one of the three or four premiere theaters in St. Petersburg. It is located at the western side of Ploshchad Iskusstv (Arts Square), right in the center of St. Petersburg. Other buildings in Arts Square include the Musical Comedy Theater, the Grand Hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonia, the State Russian Museum, and the State Ethnographic Museum, so the name of the square seems fitting. A statue of Pushkin sits in the middle of the park in the center of the square.
I've been wanting to visit the Mikhailovsky Theater, and the full playbill of seven or eight different productions in December provided me with many great opportunities. I considered attending a few different Russian operas, but with running times averaging close to four hours I did not expect to have the stamina or sustained interest to make it through an entire production. Russian ballet seemed like the better option, and I was pleased to attend a mid-week evening performance of Sleeping Beauty - especially because St. Petersburg was the location of its word premiere, in 1890. This is the second of Tchaikovsky's ballets that I've seen in St. Petersburg (I saw Swan Lake at the Alexandrinsky Theater in August).
Overall, I did not enjoy the narrative flow of this ballet as much as I have for others. The story moves along quickly during the first two acts but stalls in the third. The ballet is based on the original Charles Perrault fairy tale that everyone knows from the Disney cartoon. The first act sees the princess cursed, the second act shows a prince finding her and awakening her with a kiss, and the final act depicts their wedding. However, the third act is primarily a succession of solo and paired dances by costumed wedding guests. All of the main characters remain stationary on the periphery for almost the entire act. Although the dancing was great and the energy level was high, the story basically ends with act two.
As expected, the music for this ballet was excellent. I was unfamiliar with most of Tchaikovsky's compositions in this work, with one exception: the Sleeping Beauty Waltz that opens the second scene in the first act should be known by just about everyone (certainly, if you've seen the Disney cartoon from 1959 then you've heard an adaptation of the melody). And the dancing was of course some of the best I've seen, in any ballet anywhere.
I've been wanting to visit the Mikhailovsky Theater, and the full playbill of seven or eight different productions in December provided me with many great opportunities. I considered attending a few different Russian operas, but with running times averaging close to four hours I did not expect to have the stamina or sustained interest to make it through an entire production. Russian ballet seemed like the better option, and I was pleased to attend a mid-week evening performance of Sleeping Beauty - especially because St. Petersburg was the location of its word premiere, in 1890. This is the second of Tchaikovsky's ballets that I've seen in St. Petersburg (I saw Swan Lake at the Alexandrinsky Theater in August).
Overall, I did not enjoy the narrative flow of this ballet as much as I have for others. The story moves along quickly during the first two acts but stalls in the third. The ballet is based on the original Charles Perrault fairy tale that everyone knows from the Disney cartoon. The first act sees the princess cursed, the second act shows a prince finding her and awakening her with a kiss, and the final act depicts their wedding. However, the third act is primarily a succession of solo and paired dances by costumed wedding guests. All of the main characters remain stationary on the periphery for almost the entire act. Although the dancing was great and the energy level was high, the story basically ends with act two.
As expected, the music for this ballet was excellent. I was unfamiliar with most of Tchaikovsky's compositions in this work, with one exception: the Sleeping Beauty Waltz that opens the second scene in the first act should be known by just about everyone (certainly, if you've seen the Disney cartoon from 1959 then you've heard an adaptation of the melody). And the dancing was of course some of the best I've seen, in any ballet anywhere.
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