Swan Lake
By Debra Craine for The Times
WE HAVE been here before, yet there is still something special about a Kirov Swan Lake, especially when it’s the opening night of a packed London season. With the promise of riches to come — Balanchine and Forsythe as well as Romeo and Juliet and Bayadère — this was a night to welcome back our favourite Russian ballet company.
Sergeyev’s 1950 Soviet production of Swan Lake (based on Petipa and Ivanov’s 1895 St Petersburg staging) has proved endlessly appealing to audiences at home and abroad, despite its weak storytelling, formulaic drama and happy ending.
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Swan Lake
By Judith Mackrell for The Guardian
When the Kirov dance Swan Lake, the ballet always appears somehow whiter, more eloquently moonlit, than you remember it. On Tuesday, though, the dancers added an extra quotient of perfection that was scary even for them. Whether by fluke, or judicious casting, the Kirov as a company have rarely performed better.
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Swan Lake, Covent Garden, London
By CLEMENT CRISP for The FT
The ancient Thames ceremony of Swan Upping began on Monday. I suspect those involved will not have taken into account the infestation in London this week, with the Australian Ballet showing their birds in a highly individual Swan Lake at the Coliseum, and the Kirov Ballet opening an all-too-brief Covent Garden season with a staging of the same name.
Cygnophiles (and cygnophobes) will know what dangerous items are passed off under this title. But the Kirov's Swan Lake is the glorious proof that this can still be an eloquent work of lyric grace.
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Swan Lake, Royal Opera House, London
By Zoë Anderson for The Independent
The virtue of the Kirov Ballet's Swan Lake is its clarity. It makes a spacious, traditional frame for a ballerina. Uliana Lopatkina, who danced the first night of this London season, is being publicised as the real thing, a ballerina among ballerinas. It won't wash. As the Swan Queen, she lifts and thrusts her jaw in an expression of stony martyrdom. She looks hellbent on being the Soul of Russia.
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A Swan Queen from another world
Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews Swan Lake by the Kirov Ballet at Covent Garden
The Kirov Ballet is in London again, opening its season with Swan Lake. Unlike British companies, it performs the work not as a drama of theatre, but as a rite unique to the art of ballet. After the triviality of Australian Ballet's royal-soap-opera rewrite (at the Coliseum this week), the Russian faith in imagery and seriousness acts like a cleansing agent on the mind.
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