You Can Pay Online  
242th Season

Mariinsky II (New Theatre)

22 June
19:00
2023 | Thursday
Evening of one-act ballets: Les Noces. Le Sacre du printemps. Symphony in Three Movements
Ballet
Artists Credits
Ballet company
Tatiana Noginova, Costume Designer
Vladimir Lukasevich, Lighting Designer
Maestro Valery Gergiev, Musical Director


Le Sacre du printemps.

Musiс by Igor Stravinsky (1913) 

Scene plan: Igor Stravinsky and Nicholas Roerich

Choreography by Millicent Hodson (1987) inspired byVaslav Nijinsky (1913)

Décor and costumes after Nicholas Roerich (1913) 

Revival of the sets and costumes and supervision – Kenneth Archer 

(Revived sets and costumes © 1987 Kenneth Archer) 

Set Revival Designer – Boris Kaminsky 

Costume Revival Technologist – Tatiana Noginova 

Lighting Designer – Sergei Lukin  

World premiere of the ballet choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky: 29 May 1913, Les Ballets Russes de Serge de Diaghilev, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris

Premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre: 9 June 2003

Premiere of the revival: 13 July 2012

Running time 40 minutes

”I came up with the idea for Le Sacre du printemps while I was still composing The Firebird. I pictured a scene of some pagan rite in which a girl who was to be the sacrifice dances herself to death. But this vision came with no specific musical idea at all <…>. I told Diaghilev of Le Sacre du printemps even before he came to see me in Lausanne in late 1910 <…>. In July 1911, after the premiere of Pétrouchka, I travelled to the estate of Princess Tenisheva near Smolensk in order to meet Nicholas Roerich there and compile a stage plan for Le Sacre du printemps. I began to work with Roerich and in a few days’ time the plan of the action onstage and the names of the dances had been worked out. Roerich also made sketches of his famous backdrops, Polovtsian in spirit, as well as sketches for the costumes based on actual examples in the collection of Princess Tenisheva. Apropos, our ballet was called Sacred Spring in Russian. Le Sacre du printemps which Bakst came up with is only suitable for French. In English, the title The Coronation of Spring was closer to my original idea than The Rite of Spring.

<…> I made haste to complete Le Sacre as I wanted Diaghilev to stage it in the 1912 season. <…> The fact that the premiere of Le Sacre du printemps was surrounded by scandal is a fact probably known by everyone now. Although, however strange it may seem, I myself was totally unprepared for such an explosion of passions. The reaction of the musicians to orchestral rehearsals had not foretold this, while the plot unfolding on the stage didn’t really seem to justify causing such a riot. The ballet dancers had rehearsed for months and knew what they were doing, although what they were doing often had nothing in common with the music. “I will count to forty; in the meantime you can play,” Nijinsky said to me, “and we’ll see where we become separated.” He couldn’t understand that if, indeed, we became separated in one particular instance it didn’t mean that the rest of the time we had been together. The dancers chose to follow the counts that Nijinsky beat out rather than the musical tempo. Nijinsky, of course, counted in Russian, and in as much as in Russian numbers after ten are made up of numerous syllables – vosemnadtsat (eighteen), for example – at a fast tempo neither he nor the dancers could follow the music.

After 1913 I saw only one stage production of Le Sacre du printemps – that was Diaghilev’s revival in 1920. Then the accord between the music and the dance was better than in 1913, but Massine’s choreography was too gymnastic and in the style of Dalcroze for meto like it. 

It was then that I understood that I preferred Le Sacre du printemps to be performed in concert. Twice I reworked a few sections from Le Sacre du printemps – in 1921 for Diaghilev’s production and then in 1943 (only The Great Sacrificial Dance) for a performance (which never took place) by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. <…> But I could rework my own music endlessly <…>. When composing Le Sacre du printemps I was led by no specific system. <…> It was only my sense of sound that helped me. I heard and wrote down only what I heard. I was the vessel through which Le Sacre du printemps passed.”

Igor Stravinsky. Dialogues

 

Symphony in Three Movements

Music by Igor Stravinsky
Choreography by Radu Poklitaru
Set and Costume Designer: Anna Matison
Lighting Designer: Alexander Sivaev
Adaptation of the Lighting Design for the historic Mariinsky Theatre by Alexander Naumov
Video Graphics Designer: Alexander Kravchenko
Assistant Choreographer: Sergei Kon

 

Premiere: 30 December 2015, Mariinsky Theatre

 

Running time: 25 minutes

 

Using a symphony in ballet is a 20th century innovation. The impulse for the worldwide dissemination of the genre of the dance symphony came with a production by Fyodor Lopukhov in Petrograd in 1923 with a ballet set to the music of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. George Balanchine, who took part in that avant-garde production, took up the idea of the plastique interpretation of the complex musical format, developing his artistic credo as a choreographer thus: “You see the music and you hear the dance.” Inspired by the nature of pure dance he rejected any plot and superfluous psychology, behind his movements there were no human passions, there was just the music, its rhythm and structure defining the development of the choreographic image. Following the same lines, in 1972 Balanchine created his first dance version of the score of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. And yet there was another path in the emergence of symphonic dance. In the 1930s the choreographer Léonide Massine brought to life a whole series of symphonic ballets in which, avoiding fairy-tale narrative in a sequence of allegories and metaphors he narrated dance stories. The path chosen by Radu Poklitaru for his production of Symphony in Three Movements at the Mariinsky Theatre is close to Massine’s. In his production one can see a plot with a beginning, peripeteia and dénouement. The images conceived by the choreographer blend together with Stravinsky’s idea: the composer admitted that the third movement of his Symphony was a response to documental chronologies of the war years with lines of marching soldiers, and later with Poklitaru, it would seem, the troops come on-stage in the finale, without succumbing to the aggression of the first two movements... Olga Makarova

 

Les Noces 

Scene plan, music and text by Igor Stravinsky (1923)

Choreography by Bronislava Nijinska (1923)

Décor and Costumes: Natalia Goncharova (1923)

Musical Director: Valery Gergiev

Staged: Howard Sayette

Décor reproduced: Boris Kaminsky

Costumes reproduced: Tatiana Noginova

Lighting: Vladimir Lukin  

 

World premiere: 13 June 1923, Les Ballets Russes de Serge de Diaghilev, Théâtre de la Gaîté-Lyrique, Paris

Premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre:9 June 2003

Running time 20 minutes


Mariinsky Theatre:
1 Theatre Square
St. Petersburg
Mariinsky-2 (New Theatre):
34 Dekabristov Street
St. Petersburg
Mariinsky Concert Hall:
20 Pisareva street
St. Petersburg

To make an order, please use mobile version of our website - buy tickets from any smartphone

BEFORE YOU LEAVE...
Enter now for your chance to win a Mariinsky Backstage Tour for 2 !
An error occured. Please, try again.
You're In!
Now you are participating in the drawing of amazing Mariinsky Backstage Tour for 2!