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(More customer reviews)Uliana Lopatkina was one of the last proteges of legendary Kirov ballerina (and, later, pedagogue) Natalia Dudinskaya. Lopatkina is so loyal to the memory of her teacher that she refuses to dance in the "new-old" reconstructions of Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadere, as she considers the reconstructions a betrayal of Dudinskaya's husband, Konstantin Sergeyev, whose stagings of Swan Lake, the Sleeping Beauty, La Bayadere and Raymonda were considered the standard stagings in the old Soviet Union.
This Swan Lake is the third full video version of Sergeyev's Swan Lake from the Mariinsky in twenty years. I think that, all things considered, it is also the best, although the film with Yulia Makhalina and Zelensky is also very fine. The reason I give this film the slight edge is that it was filmed in front of a live audience, and thus has a frission and excitement missing from the Makhalina/Zelensky video, which was a "canned" performance. Also, Makhalina in 1990 was a lovely dancer, but very young, and her O/O in my opinion was beautiful but not a fully developed portrayal. Lopatkina also handles the technical challenges of the ballet better than Makhalina.
Sergeyev's Swan Lake, despite employing a jarring happy ending and an annoying jester, remains one of the most elegant versions of the ballet anywhere. The Mariinsky corps de ballet dances Swan Lake as if it were in their blood, making Ivanov's famous "white" acts a hypnotically beautiful experience. The national dances in Act 3 are danced with an impeccable vigor and sense of character. This is Russian ballet at its best.
As for the leads, I admit I find Danila Korsuntsev good-looking but a bit vapid. I wonder if he was chosen because he's one of the few dancers tall enough to partner the 5'10" Lopatkina.
Indeed, from the minute we see her bourree onto the stage, with her long arms flapping slowly like a swan, it is the Lopatkina Show. She is so tall and long-limbed that she makes Syvlie Guillem look petite and stubby. She is the most regal Swan Queen I have ever seen, with strong emphasis on the Queen part. Her Odette has an air of remoteness and inscrutability. You have the feeling that Odette has been a swan for a long, long time, and this is not her first heartbreak. Perhaps to give the idea that this Swan Queen is so very Sad, Lopatkina even eschews the traditional jete of Odette's entrance. Lopatkina's ultra-thin arms give her the illusion of absolute weightlessness. On the one hand, this is incredibly beautiful, with each hand gesture seemingly designed to accompany a note of the score. On the other hand, sometimes it can seem like a lot of "fingers stretch to the left, eyes glance to the right" posing, albeit beautiful posing. There's little sense of spontaneity - indeed, Lopatkina's Odette at times barely seems to be aware that she is dancing *with* Siegfried. The "Love Duet" is danced so slowly Makarova would check her watch, with Lopatkina assuming a trance-like expression from the first unfolding of her arms to the last penchee. It's all a bit marbelized. I wish that there was more warmth behind the magisterial beauty, yet it's an undeniably commanding portrayal, and one that I'm happy was caught on video.
If Lopatkina's Odette has an air of almost supernatural remoteness, her Odile is arrestingly hard, like a diamond. She does not smile seductively -- instead, she has an air of a "touch me and you die" femme fatale, much like a film noir heroine. Whereas her Odette seemed to be a showcase of adagio dancing, her Odile has traces of her teacher Dudinskaya's famed technical brilliance. Her long legs swing through the air like knives. Her Plisetskaya-like red hair seems to glow and clashes brilliantly with her shiny black tutu. Her fouettes are brilliantly executed, with several doubles thrown in. Her long bravas at the end of the act are well-deserved.
I must admit that I really dislike the tacked-on happy ending of Sergeyev's Swan Lake, choreographed to please the Soviet era bigwigs. The beginning of the fourth act is breathtaking beautiful, with the formerly energetic swans of the second act transformed into sad, elegiac creatures. Indeed, there couldn't be a ballerina more unsuited to the happy ending Swan Lake than Lopatkina. Her remoteness works to her advantage in Act IV. Odette has become unreachable, despite Siegfried's pleas. Lopatkina has such a grand air of tragedy in the fourth act, that her sudden transformation to a smiling human is unforgivably jarring. But I suppose no version of Swan Lake is ever fully satisfying, and we should all be grateful that Lopatkina's Odette/Odile was captured on film for posterity.
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