Word: raymonda
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...artistic relationship of Nureyev and Fonteyn, he is the dominant force, amending, criticizing, suggesting. It comes naturally to him, just as his gifts for choreography do. His restaging of the Kirov's full-length Raymonda was a pretty, sugar-spun spectacle and, along with Nureyev's offstage antics, the roaring sensation of last year's Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy. Last October he rechoreographed the Petipa-Ivanov version of Swan Lake in Vienna. In his strong belief that "the Amazonian takeover" of the ballet has resulted in an appalling denigration of the male, Nureyev scissored...
...absence of a plot is no disaster. Raymonda becomes a series of exquisitely varied, buoyantly assertive dances that cascade at staccato pace across the stage, and after all it is the dancing that counts...
...could never follow the story of Raymonda,'" complained Prince Peter Lieven, after seeing the Marius Petipa-Alexander Glazunov ballet, which was premiered at St. Petersburg's Maryin-sky Theater...
...Raymonda, as revised and presented last week by Leningrad's Kirov Ballet at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, makes no more sense. There's still the wicked Saracen and the noble Hungarian knight named Jean de Brienne, a duel, an attempted abduction, a wed ding, Spanish and Moorish dances, and of course the maiden Raymonda herself...
Impressionistic sets convey the mood of weightlessness and airiness suggested by Glazunov's pastel-colored music. Raymonda's feather-light leaps and soaring turns keep the heroine airborne for the better part of the performance. Raymonda is among the most difficult roles in Russian ballet, and it was rendered with elegance, grace and precision in two successive New York performances by Irina Kolpakova and Kaleria Fedicheva. Jean de Brienne, portrayed in both performances by Vladilen Semenov, Kolpakova's real-life husband, spends most of the time as Raymonda's elevator...