20.01.2021

A Thousand and One Nights is Premiered in St Petersburg

From January 15 to January 22 the ballet company of the Primorsky Stage of the Mariinsky Theatre tours in Saint Petersburg for the seventh time. Although the epidemiologic situation is unstable, the theatre management decided to go on this yearly tour. The ballet dancers brought three shows to St. Petersburg and started their tour with the premiere of A Thousand and One Nights at the Mariinsky Theatre. In August 2020 this ballet was first performed after the theatre business interruption. The second part of the tour includes Le Corsaire and The Sleeping Beauty.

The visit of the Primorsky Territory Governor Oleg Nikolaevich Kozhemyako to St. Petersburg – he attended the final performance of A Thousand and One Nights on January 17 – also showed that the present tour were very important. The Governor offered his off-stage congratulations on the dancers’ success and expressed his hope that the Primorsky Stage would soon be able to represent the ballet not only in but outside Russia. “I am very grateful to the dancers for their artistry and brilliant performance. They have demonstrated the level that Petersburgers, perhaps, could not expect. This is a result of collaborative work done by the choreographer Eldar Aliev, the designer Pyotr Okunev, the orchestra, the chorus, and the ballet company. Their success may be judged by full halls, storms of applause and favorable reviews,” the Governor stressed in his interview.

During their meeting on January 17, Oleg Kozhemyako and Valery Gergiev discussed some plans to develop the Primorsky Stage, including constructing a theatrical complex of which the Primorsky Stage of the Mariinsky Theatre would be a part.

“We made some complicated decisions during the pandemic period; one of them was to hold the V Mariinsky Far East Festival in August 2020, in which such world stars as Elena Stikhina, Yulia Matochkina, Ekaterina Semenchuk, Sergei Skorokhodov, Vladislav Sulimsky, Yevgeny Nikitin, and Ildar Abdrazakov would take part. It was important for us to put such names beside names of new stars of the Primorsky Stage, among whom there are Alena Diyanova, Anastasia Kikot, Laura Bustamante, Tatiana Makarchuk, Mergen Sandanov, Yevgeny Plekhanov, Vyacheslav Vasiliev, and others. In the ballets staged by the Primorsky Stage, soloists of the Mariinsky Theatre (including Renata Shakirova, Yekaterina Chebykina and Roman Belyakov) danced together with those of the Primorsky Stage (including Anna Samostrelova, Irina Sapozhnikova, Lilia Berezhnova, Sergei Umanets, and Kanat Nadyrbek),” said Valery Gergiev.

The Maestro emphasized that the traditional tour, on which the Primorsky Stage had gone at such a challenging time, indicated that the team spirit grew both in terms of dynamics and in terms of harmony. “The tour of our own company yet flying from afar to Saint Petersburg is a significant phenomenon. The new staging of A Thousand and One Nights became a snap before everything. Everyone is gratified by Fikret Amirov’s music, Eldar Alev’s choreography, dancers’ mastery, and Ayyub Guliev’s conducting. We should more often invite him as a guest conductor to take part in our future projects. The long-awaited meeting with Oleg Nikolaevich Kozhemyako was important for us. We discussed some pressing matters on developing the Primorsky Stage of the Mariinsky Theatre and constructing the theatrical complex in Vladivostok. We managed to attend the premiere and get our jollies both out of the ballet and out of the rapturous reception given to it by the St. Petersburg audience,” said Valery Gergiev.

The Art Director of the Mariinsky Theatre also told members of the media about some challenging plans for the Primorsky Stage. He said, “The ballet plans includes La Bayadère which was choreographed by Marius Petipa and later revised by Vladimir Ponomarev and Vakhtang Chabukiani, Raymonda and other classical and contemporary works. We also plan to expend considerably the opera repertoire with new representations or, perhaps, with operas to be shifted from the Mariinsky Theatre. Turandot and Die Fledermaus are just some of the operas to be staged in the 2020/21 season. We also consider an opportunity for shifting A Thousand and One Nights from the Primorsky Stage to the main stage of the Mariinsky Theatre. This is a most suggestive fact. The artistic links between St. Petersburg and Vladivostok get firmly established. In the immediate future we will more often see the best artists from the Primorsky Stage company on the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre and vice versa.

For reference:

The ballet A Thousand and One Nights created after the well-known collection of Arabian and Persian tales was first staged at the Primorsky Stage of the Mariinsky Theatre in August 2020. The ballet was choreographed by Eldar Aliev, a Ballet Master in Chief who often turned earlier to the score by Fikret Amirov, an eminent Azerbaijani composer, and staged the ballet at various theaters. However, he newly choreographed it for the Primorsky Stage. Pyotr Okunev designed picturesque scenes being combined with video projections. The manually embroidered costumes and fancy scenes for this production were made in St. Petersburg and Vladivostok. At the premiere the baton was held by Ayyub Guliev, a Principal Conductor and a Music Director of the Azerbaijan State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre.

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