My familiarity with The Golden Age comes primarily from a film made ca. 1986 by a British company, if I remember correctly. It aired not long after on A&E, back in the days when Stacy Keach hosted its weekly performing arts program, and my homemade VHS tape subsequently got a lot of use. (Well, parts of it, anyway. Mostly the bits with Gediminas Taranda.) By then the ballet’s original Compere, Vladimir Derevianko, had left the USSR, so that part was played by Mikhail Tsivin, but otherwise the film featured the original cast of Natalia Bessmertnova, Irek Mukhamedov, Taranda and Tatiana Golikova. The ballet fell out of the repertoire following Grigorovich’s ouster in 1995, but it was revived in 2006 at the initiative of Alexei Ratmansky, who wanted all of Shostakovich’s ballet scores in the Bolshoi’s repertoire. Ultimately The Bright Stream stuck, The Bolt proved only slightly more enduring than the original, and The Golden Age played for four or five seasons before falling into disuse again.
The 2006 version, staged while the main theater was under renovation, compressed the second and third acts …show more content…
The steps given to the corps is often simplistic to the point of being silly. As beautifully as the adagios were danced, these duets are practically interchangeable with every other Grigorovich pas de deux, just as Rita's solo choreography looks like every other solo Grigorovich made for his heroines. The scenes for Yashka and his bandits had always been my least favorite, and even with one of them eliminated, they were still much too long. Here the “unmusicality” of Grigorovich is most obvious, in his slavish mimicry of what is not especially “danceable” music. There are swooping brass notes followed by long rests. When the orchestra plays, the dancers move. When the music stops, the dancers freeze. Some visual counterpoint would have been nice. At best the trashy restaurant scenes could be qualified as guilty
The 2006 version, staged while the main theater was under renovation, compressed the second and third acts …show more content…
The steps given to the corps is often simplistic to the point of being silly. As beautifully as the adagios were danced, these duets are practically interchangeable with every other Grigorovich pas de deux, just as Rita's solo choreography looks like every other solo Grigorovich made for his heroines. The scenes for Yashka and his bandits had always been my least favorite, and even with one of them eliminated, they were still much too long. Here the “unmusicality” of Grigorovich is most obvious, in his slavish mimicry of what is not especially “danceable” music. There are swooping brass notes followed by long rests. When the orchestra plays, the dancers move. When the music stops, the dancers freeze. Some visual counterpoint would have been nice. At best the trashy restaurant scenes could be qualified as guilty