United Kingdom English National Ballet’s Swan Lake: Dancers of English National Ballet, English National Ballet Philharmonic / Daniel Parkinson (conductor). London Coliseum, 12.1.2023. (JO’D)
Production:
Music – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Choreography – Derek Deane after Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov
Additional Choreography – Frederick Ashton
Design – Peter Farmer
Lighting – Howard Harrison
Dancers included:
Odette/Odile – Emma Hawes
Prince Siegfried – Aitor Arrieta
Rothbart – James Streeter
The Queen – Jane Haworth
Before the London Coliseum’s purple curtain rises, the plaintive opening of Tchaikovsky’s rating from the English National Ballet Philharmonic underneath Daniel Parkinson stills the viewers and attracts it in to the tragic story that may unfold. A prologue reveals the Princess Odette (Emma Hawes) being kidnapped by the sorcerer Rothbart (a convincingly malevolent and abusive James Streeter). Odette’s look in human type, previous to her transformation right into a swan, heightens the tragic sense of what was, what might need been. After she has left the stage the birdlike Rothbart, a first-rate mover like Manon’s brother in Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon, appears to conjure up the court docket scene that follows. From the beginning due to this fact, Prince Siegfried is doomed.
‘I was brought up,’ explains choreographer Derek Deane in an interview within the programme notes, ‘to collect everything together, to understand it musically, choreographically, and narratively.’ His model of Swan Lake, tailored in 2000 from an in-the-round manufacturing created three years earlier, is each satisfying and coherent. The character dances by the courtiers and peasants within the two court docket scenes ‘balance’ the ethereal marshalling of the swans within the two scenes set by a lake. Under conductor Parkinson’s brisk baton, the Czardas and Mazurka by no means drag. That is a lot gained. Even if, on the opening evening at the very least, this similar sprightliness of tempo appeared to rob the music of its closing transformation from the plaintive to the triumphant.
Along along with his personal choreography, and that of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, Derek Deane contains the choreography of Frederick Ashton. After the ensemble Waltz of the primary act, Ashton’s pas de trois (Julia Conway, Katja Khaniukova, Erik Woolhouse) permits the attention to deal with the steps of the danse d’école. In Act III it’s the Neapolitan Dance (Adriana Lizardi, Rhys Antoni Yeomans), Ashton’s ‘gift of love’, in 1963, to the dancer Alexander Grant.
Emma Hawes, dancing on the music as Odette/Odile, is delicate and clear in all the things she does. It may be this delicacy that makes her appear extra suited in the mean time, her fouetté however, to the tragic Odette than to her glittering and scheming alter ego. It was as Odette exhibiting forgiveness of Siegfried for being deceived by Odile, Odette accepting her destiny earlier than the suicide, that Emma Hawes made a extremely outstanding reference to the viewers. Aitor Arrieta brings his considerate, and likewise delicate, stage presence to the function of Prince Siegfried. He couldn’t be extra eloquent, in his port de bras and within the easily carried out arabesques of the Act I pas seul, if he have been delivering a soliloquy in Shakespeare.
What Emma Hawes does as Odile is made extra intense by the feminine dancers of the corps de ballet (led by Precious Adams and Emily Suzuki) as swans who encompass her, shelter her, or present a chorus-like background to her pas de deux with Prince Siegfried. Swans who emerge, at first of the ultimate act, from a financial institution of dry ice that seeps out into the auditorium and whose arms, transferring collectively like wings or like waves, amplify the music’s tragic fatalism.
John O’Dwyer