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Stravinsky - The Real Deal

Published Friday 4 July 2008 at 12:55 by Richard Edmonds

This totally ravishing triple bill could have run in Birmingham for a fortnight. But as it was, David Bintley’s inspired programme brought new life to three Stravinsky classics.

Lovers of the master’s music were not disappointed by the evening, with Barry Wordsworth taking us safely through Stravinsky’s fiendishly difficult score for Petrushka, not to mention Card Game, and Nicholas Kok finding the magic of the Fairy’s Kiss.

With the company on top form, few BRB evenings can have yielded its devoted audiences such a variety of remarkable sensations ranging from the lovely Benois designs for Petrushka (with Alexander Campbell giving a poignant performance as the doomed puppet, whose tragedy is played out against the indifferent laughter and merriment of the Russian Shrovetide Butter Week fair), to John F Macfarlane’s silvery witchcraft in the costumes and sets developed for this exciting premiere of the Fairy’s Kiss, and the witty drolleries of Card Game.

After a fine evening, it is Campbell who stays in the mind. He wears little makeup as Petrushka, and gives us appropriately the sense of a human being, a delicate Pierrot, trapped inside the crude costume of a fairground puppet. He wonders at the beauty of the Ballerina (elegantly danced by Ambra Vallo) - he is overjoyed at her slightest favour, and distressed by the attentions paid to her by Dominic Antonucci’s swaggering, macho Moor.

To see Campbell dancing again, a few minutes later, as the Young Man in the Fairy’s Kiss, allows us to marvel at this dancer’s lightness and elegance, not to mention his stamina. This a ballet of enchantment. Memories of Scandinavian legends occur to us, young boys kissed by icy enchantresses who enslave them, before they are killed.

Michael Corder’s choreography finds very well the haunting dance language of this gripping ballet and will probably deepen in its affecting continuity as the performances develop. At the moment, the evil quality at the heart of the scenario is not always as chilling as it might be.

Card Game is filled with delicious drolleries, with the dancers picking up perfectly John Cranko’s original concept of a slightly deranged pack of cards out for a bit of fun. A bouquet of roses goes to Jamie Bond’s wonderfully funny Joker and Elisha Willis’ quaint Queen of Hearts, two more highlights in a gorgeous evening filled with such things, which I am sure would have delighted Stravinsky.

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