SEMIZOROVA DANCES IN MATINEE ‘RAYMONDA’

At the Saturday matinee performance by the Bolshoi, Nina Semizorova didn’t so much dance the role of Raymonda as the Glazunov score.

Characterization remained minimal, emotions barely suggested in acting terms. However, the expressive extremes of the music were fully embodied in Semizorova’s dancing, from the floating, pluperfect balances in the dream pas de deux to the exultant bravura of the Grand Pas Hongrois.

Obviously, Semizorova paid a price for her anti-dramatic approach: In the scarf variation of Act I, for example, she wasn’t a lonely young woman spontaneously creating designs in space, she was a dancer completing a formal composition--and the passage (like much of her dancing Saturday) became a ravishing abstraction.

Her performance, however, represented classicism of exceptional precision and refinement, with its generous flow of movement continually shaped by meticulous attention to niceties of placement, modulations of dynamics and the musicality that always seemed the key to her interpretative choices.

As Jean de Brienne, Yuri Vasyuchenko scarcely approached Semizorova’s level of technical freedom, but he partnered attentively, looked tolerably credible in his battle gear and dispatched his solos efficiently.

Although Andrei Shakhin appeared stiff in passages defining Abderakhman’s slinky body language, he projected enormous intensity along with a welcome, unexpected touch of dignity, and hurtled through many of the caractere challenges with more daring than his predecessor.

Among the contingent of courtiers and friends, the noble Alexei Fadeyechev appeared, uncredited, as a humble troubadour (Yuri Posokhov was listed on the program sheet). Nina Speranskaya danced the “second variant” in the dream with great delicacy.