Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 30 Nov. - 6 Dec. 2000 Issue No.510

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Cobras in the nursery

By David Blake

The Russian Ballet Season, Nutcracker (world premiere presented at the Maryinsky Theatre, St Petersberg, 17 December), choreographer Segei Vikharev, conductor Alexander Bolchakov, Cairo Opera House Main Hall, 14 December

"Oh, my goodness. It will all go forever," says one of the people in Chekhov's Three Sisters. Well it didn't -- go on forever that is -- though only a little survives, the music of Tchaikovsky's last ballets and Gontcharov's writings for instance, as shadows to show what was once the burgeoning of the Russian middle class before the 1917 eruption wiped it out forever.

Strange that a compilation like the Nutcracker should cast such a potent spell. The false festive sugar coating of the music is really a caustic comment on affairs at the centre of the imperial Fabergé easter egg, an over-complex surface object with nothing but a rotten yolk at the centre. Ironically Nutcracker is also a product of the delectable potency of Tchaikovsky's genius for tunes, almost as melancholic as Schubert's.

There was a huge audience at this Nut, perhaps because of the festive spirit abroad. But tears are more easily aroused than laughter, or so it seems. Seems, indeed, is a good word for the Nut. Remember, even the librettist is forced at the end to say it is all just a beautiful dream.

But like the reality that produced it, to which Tchaikovsky was responding, it is not so beautiful after all. Two earlier showings in Cairo of Russian versions of the Nutcracker, one by the exalted Bolshoi, had been inferior to the more humble Cairo Opera Ballet production which was warm, lively, human and far closer to the original events. The atmosphere of the local Nut was upper middle-class Russia -- no false, shoddy winter glitter but a comment with heart, showing kids as they are all over the world. The mice and rats were not bath toys but projections of childhood fantasies, sinister enough, but easily put in their place. This is where home is, the Cairo production said, and everyone keeps to their status. And Tchaikovsky's music was prophetic, because the home was the first thing that disappeared.

The present Russian production failed to reach the heights of Swan Lake, first offering of the visiting Russians, mainly because there is not such a strong peg of romanticism on which to hang the Nut, a farrago tale of dear little Clara and her fantasies of princes and foreign parts. Everything falls to pieces by the end under the sheer weight of the libretto.

photos: Sherif Sonbol

The Russians went off further into the woods and it all nearly petered out. However Russians are Russians and no one can dance like a Russian. Whatever fails about a ballet it is never the dancers. Their hearts are in their feet and their feet are in heaven. All the principals do their work well. Clara is always lovable, never curt or self-satisfied. The princes do their portering with ease. The Rat King is nice, his troupe nasty. And the endless variations which lie in wait during the next act hold out a promise of excitement.

It proves to be a promise partly fulfilled. In the first ballet we said goodbye to the tall white corps, the swans. In the second ballet, the Nut ended with much snow that fell in all directions at once, silver white and blue diamonds. Swans are tall birds, so tall ballerinas are okay, and the tall girls fitted, transforming the Lac into a poem. But six-foot snowflakes in the Nut do not work. All those extended inches were more or less wasted. What this production did was open out the final scenes of the Nutcracker into what it undoubtedly was at the beginning, the masterpiece of the Ballet Blanc -- all that snow and gently tripping feet set a pattern of authentic splendour on the opera stage.

The company was faced with matching up to Tchaikovsky's high vision and the demands of the choreography. When it was created the Nut could avail itself of the greatest classical dancers ever to dance. The Maryinsky had bottomless resources. But as the middle classes went forever, so did the glory of the golden age of the classical dance. The Nut suffered badly from this revolution.

The old Cairo production played safe and intimate, and kept even the climax, the horrifying turns, leaps and pirouettes, on a low profile. The Russians, going all the way, exposed their principal dancers to risks they were incapable of executing, so there was a sense of strain in the snow. The girls did well but the men, the principals especially, all dressed for things gala, lacked the sheer muscular power of the older male dancers of Russia.

But this "Russian Ballet" did a good job under difficult conditions. Each dancer was stretched well beyond the safety zone. Had they had some support from the bad orchestra things might have ended with some of the authentic sparkle.

As it was this Nut ended in the dark, in a sort of no man's land with both princes leaning to a still sweet but vague and puzzled Clara.

Piano and Violin Recital, violinist Tomoko Kato, pianist Kei Itoh, Cairo Opera House Small Hall, 24 December

RAGS, BAGS AND LOUD CONVERSATION: There were plenty of cobras about in the audience. It doesn't matter how distinguished your musical antecedents are or how exalted your teaching -- when the noble art of music is faced with the Small Hall of the Cairo Opera House, bursting with its new audience of semi-informed layabouts, it becomes an undignified scramble for survival and self-justification on the part of both audience and artists.

What's going on here has nothing to do with music. Not long ago a genuinely ravishing concert given in the small hall by David Hales and soprano Nevine Allouba was wrecked by the "new" audience -- door slamming during Schumann's most moving music -- chatter, full-voiced and constant, with everyone changing places to make closer contact with their friends. What happened at the present concert was even worse. There were more of them, and their confidence and changing-room intimacies are now rampant.

The two players are a much appreciated couple in centres where music is performed seriously. Both show high training and are professional artists, and of course, being Japanese, are polite. There was no trace of what was going on below them in the hall. They still played like people possessed. Their original programme seems to have been altered, so we had no Busoni and no Bach variations. The Handel sonata which started the programme was very firm and, as they used to say, jiggy. Though finally old-fashioned when performed so well it unfailingly carries the coloratura of another age. Brahms was another matter. Big B is Holy Joe for most music lovers, the master of storm and stress and melancholia. All these things were in the artists' playing, but the audience night as well have been inhabitants of a faraway planet.

That the mood and the magic disappeared was due in no way to the artists' beautiful playing. The pianist has a deep and dramatic tone, and she can let fly in upward surges of sound with complete authority.

When the intermission came a curious thing took place. Our bright cherished lovers of music gathered up their bags and boxes, gave the usual festive show of good will to all and sundry, and took off. Half the hall had emptied. Is this anyone's idea of how to foster musical appreciation? Some of the glory returned with the small Hika music of Toru Takemitsu, hiaku-like but evocative of some landscape of light temporarily shrouded by storm. This was a return to order, followed by the Caesar Franck old-fashioned sonata for violin and piano. It comes from the old glory days of France and her own fallen empires, and so the players gave it the full treatment -- great waves of rich sound and operatic flourishes of romantic feeling which were heart-warming. Music cannot be put down, even by the disrespectful, when real feeling and devotion are foremost.

Kato and Itoh deserve special salutations.

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