The most impressive DVD I've seen this month is of celebrated choreographer Roland Petit's Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades), recorded at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater in 2005. The first thing to note is that, though the music is indeed Tchaikovsky's, the work bears little relation to his opera Pique Dame. Instead, it's an original ballet by Petit danced to Tchaikovsky's ever-popular and agonized Sixth Symphony (Pathetique). But the result is brilliant indeed.
Nicolay Tsiskaridze and Ilze Liepa lead the cast as the hero Hermann and the mysterious Countess. Both are worth watching in their own right, but it's Petit's highly original conception that welds together this strange and fascinating dance masterpiece.
Tsiskaridze's dancing, and his movement generally, blend the classical and the contemporary. Liepa, on the other hand, stalks about with arms extended to seemingly impossible lengths like some grotesque femme fatale. She's a young performer, but her character is 88 in Pushkin's original short story.
I used to go to ballets and think that I'd seen better dancers at discos. Watching this wonderful performance, however, I'm not so sure.
In an extended bonus feature, Tsiskaridze points out that Pique Dame and the Pathetique are both sacred items in Russian culture. For Petit to dare to put them together was extraordinary, he says. Clearly it was even more extraordinary for him to bring it off, and then be decorated for his services to Russia by President Vladimir Putin shortly after the premier.
For her part, Liepa talks of Petit's "magical intuition," and recollects how, as she waited in the theater's cafeteria before her audition, she decided to relax and accept whatever fate had decreed. She was in fact accepted immediately, and thus became the vehicle for Petit's innovative introduction of an erotic element into the relationship between the young Hermann and his octogenarian opposite.
Included on the DVD is another Petit work, Webern's Passacaglia. It's less interesting, and indeed largely abstract. But anything by Petit is worth seeing - his work is wholly unlike anyone else's.
Meanwhile, Deutsche Grammophon have just released its DVD version of Beethoven's five piano concertos played by the then 33-year-old Krystian Zimerman and the Vienna Philharmonic. Leonard Bernstein had conducted them in the last three in 1989, so after his death the following year Zimerman recorded the first two, conducting the orchestra himself from the keyboard in the old 18th-century manner.
The performances are generally restrained and transparent, an approach from which the slow movements benefit most. Bernstein's stage presence - like a ragged, ghoulish bat - contrasts strongly with Zimerman's cool, upright reticence. He just manages to evade some of the older man's insistent bear hugs at the end of their three concertos together.
Well Go USA, which issued Petit's Pique Dame in Taiwan also offers The Essential Sutherland. In it Joan Sutherland and her conductor husband Richard Bonynge sit on a sofa and purport to chat in a relaxed manner about her career by way of introduction to a long sequence of operatic excerpts.
Sutherland claims Norma was her favorite role, but you have only to watch her singing Casta Diva here to know she can't hold a candle to Montserrat Caballe's studied seriousness. Caballe is a proud Druid priestess whereas Sutherland is a shy woman clutching her mistletoe in near-desperation. Sutherland is pretty and alone, Caballe matronly and regal, and with a secret plan.
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