patrikpen: A Different Swan Lake in Music and Vision 25 September

lunedì 7 novembre 2016

A Different Swan Lake in Music and Vision 25 September

A Different 'Swan Lake'

Tchaikovsky in Rome
impresses GIUSEPPE PENNISI

In Rome, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake arrived only in 1937, almost fifty year after its debut in Moscow, but since then Teatro dell'Opera has included this ballet in its program almost every season. For the Roman audience Swan Lake is almost a staple of the Christmas and New Year holiday period as well in the program at the open air Baths of Caracalla Summer Festival. Some three years ago, Teatro dell'Opera unveiled a new production to replace that seen almost every year from 2003 to 2011. (See Perfect Settings, 3 January 2014). Over the 2013-14 holiday period, there were two other stagings of the ballet: one by a local private group and one by a Russian travelling company. Again, during the December 2016-January 2017 period, other productions have been announced, a further indication of the ballet's popularity.

Teatro dell'Opera presented a new production on 27 September 2016. I was in the audience. There will be fifteen performances until 5 November. I should point out that the production is new for Rome and Italy but had its European premiere in 2009 at the Badisches Staatstheater of Karlsruhe. Its original staging was in Philadelphia in 2004, and over the last twelve years, the production has been fine tooled.

As created by choreographer and stage director Christopher Wheeldon, Swan Lake is clearly not a children's Christmas show. It was composed during one of the worst periods of the composer's life, whilst he was attempting to conceal his own sexual orientation with a marriage which was short and ended tragically. In the score, the juxtaposition between B flat-D-F and B-F sharp-C expresses not only the confrontation between good and evil but also the composer's inner intimate torment.

A scene from Christopher Wheeldon's 'Swan Lake' at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. Photo © 2016 Jean-Charles Verchere

In this production, the conceit is that a male dancer in a Degas-like studio is portraying Prince Siegfried in a rehearsal. À la Stanislavsky, he identifies himself with his role and becomes Siegfried. Reality and fantasy blur. Like Rudolf Nureyev, Wheeldon has set Swan Lake inside a room, in the rehearsal area of the Paris Opéra at Palais Garnier, during the belle époque. Also in the third act the banquet does not take place in a cardboard German Medieval Castle but in a plush restaurant in Toulouse Lautrec's times. Among rich upper class gentlemen, such as members of the Jockey Club who acquired mistresses from the Paris Opera Ballet, the man in the top hat and tails from a Degas painting becomes the stand-in for Rothbart, the evil magician. This masked opera ball is all too real, full of decadence and brilliantly summed up in the divertissement: a Russian dance that becomes a strip tease, an invasion of can-can girls (dancing to the tarantella!), and best of all, an overcooked Spanish dance for a smirking and shoving trio.

This and other elements suggest that the lakeside encounters of Odette, the Swan Queen, and Prince Siegfried, as protagonist, are projections of the hero's mind. But in the end the male dancer returns to reality. Definitely not Siegfried, and back in the classroom, he does a double take when he sees his ballerina as herself. Escape from his ambiguous reality was one of Tchaikovsky's key problems whilst composing this ballet.

Christopher Wheeldon conveys nothing heavy, but something highly innovative and imaginative. He is fascinated by the way in which dancers train and perform. Here again, he mixes the humorous and the serious. He has rechoreographed a hilarious floor show for the ballroom scene, in which Odile, Odette's evil double, seduces Siegfried. But this masked ball is the reality that the hero encounters.

But Tchaikovsky is not only ballet. Nir Kabaretti conducts the Teatro dell'Opera Orchestra very well, and with an almost symphonic flair to underline the composer's intimate troubles.

Federico Bonelli and Laurent Cuthbertson in Christopher Wheeldon's 'Swan Lake' at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. Photo © 2016 Yasuko Kageyama

The three young protagonists are simply excellent: Federico Bonelli as the principal dancer and Siegfried, Lauren Cuthberson as Odile and Odette, and Manuel Parucini as Rothbarth and a wealthy gentleman. All the others are of high standards too. The audience was enthusiastic: there were ten minutes of accolades.