BALLET REVIEW : ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Dozes

There are traditions and there are traditions. Some are more dubious than others.

When it comes to “The Sleeping Beauty,” one wants to look to the Kirov Ballet, that fabled font of authentic purity in Leningrad.

It was here in 1890 that the world first encountered Tchaikovsky’s wondrous score and Petipa’s magical choreography. The theater was then called the Maryinsky, the city St. Petersburg.

The current version of that presumably definitive production was chosen to inaugurate the much-vaunted 9-performance season by the mighty Kirov at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Friday. It had to be a glamorous occasion.

As fate would have it, the performance delighted those who simply regard ballet as an erratic and exotic entertainment in which pretty girls wear short, fluffy skirts and dance on their toes. It turned out to be a severe disappointment for anyone who happens to really care about ballet in general, and about “Sleeping Beauty” in particular.

Created in 1952 by Konstantin Sergeyev, the Kirov production represents a clumsy fusion of fine academic maneuver, misplaced Soviet realism and slick revisionism, all masquerading as sacred convention.

Sergeyev--whose long reign of power was a matter of sociopolitical rather than artistic significance--second-guessed Petipa at whim. He swept away most of the crucial mime passages, consigning story-telling to a series of blurred gestures and danced vagaries. He sanctioned brutal cuts, favored prose over poetry, smoothed out class distinctions, telescoped logic, oversimplified complex textures and blithely distorted the appropriate post-Petipa emendations of Fedor Lopukhov.

There is, of course, no such thing as a perfectly accurate recreation of the original “Sleeping Beauty.” Ballets evolve. They don’t survive.

Scholars agree, however, that the historic production first staged in London in 1939 by Nicholas Sergeyev (no relation to Konstantin) came reasonably close to the real thing. The Kirov version, by comparison, may savor the essential Maryinsky spirit, but it stubbornly violates the letter of the Petipa law.

Oleg Vinogradov, the brave renegade who has directed the Kirov since 1977, could have changed all that last spring when he supervised a new incarnation of the ballet. Surprisingly, however, he was content merely to refurbish the existing Sergeyev perversion.

Costa Mesa didn’t even get to see an honest replica of that perversion. Given the exigencies of touring and the economies imposed by his U.S. hosts, Vinogradov made some drastic adjustments. He sanctioned chunky excisions, including the panorama transformation and some character dances that are still illustrated in the souvenir program. He thinned out the courtly populace and even deleted the children who should be central participants in the garland dance.

This, then, is an essentially botched “Beauty,” a ballet that blunts the narrative on one hand and diminishes the choreographic structure on the other. It still can be redeemed to a degree, perhaps, by great dancing. The dancing on the first two nights was good, for the most part, but not great.

The best dancing came from the corps de ballet. The Kirov women still move with the legendary discipline and suavity that have become their second nature. The secondary roles--mostly semi-anonymous fairies--are now cast with fascinating young dancers who obviously are incipient ballerinas.

In the central roles, the company did not seem to put its best feet forward. The bureaucratic seniority system gave us casting that valued long service over ideal aptitude for the challenges at hand.

Princess Aurora on opening night was Galina Mezentseva, a 37-year-old ballerina whose merits are much admired in Leningrad and much debated in the West. To Russian eyes she may seem ethereal. To ours she seems scrawny.

She commands a steely technique, undeniable authority and endless determination. She also commands painfully thin arms, spindly legs, feet that claw the stage more than they skim it. To trace the princess’s evolution from breathless child to fragile vision to blossoming woman, Mezentseva adopted an unchanging vocabulary of taut phrases, angular accents and all-purpose smiles.

On Saturday, she was succeeded by another celebrated principal, the 38-year-old Lubov Kunakova. Smaller, rounder, more compact, she turned out to be very secure, very bright, especially deft in legato maneuvers, and equally blank.

Incidentally, neither heroine indulged in the extended balances with upraised arms that usually punctuate the pauses in the Rose Adagio. That beloved practice, we are told, emanates not from Russia but from postwar Britain.

Nor did either ballerina fall in the signature fishdives of the grand pas de deux, even though no less an expert than Tamara Karsavina attributed that bravura feat to Petipa himself.

Both princesses were partnered by Evgeny Neff as Prince Desire. This solid, attentive cavalier did little to make one regret that Sergeyev wanted the hero to remain little more than a porteur.

Yulia Makhalina, just 20, served notice of a major talent as a vibrant, generous, long-legged Lilac Fairy. Her dramatic impact was compromised a bit by the silly winged nightie she wore after the prologue. One would like to blame this sartorial and stylistic aberration on unbending house rules, but when Mezentseva danced this role in New York, she remained happily tutued throughout.

For the flourishes of the Bluebird pas de deux on opening night, an exquisite novice named Elena Pankova was partnered by Vitali Tsvetkov, imposingly muscular but rather earthbound. The stellar coupling on Saturday found Tatiana Terekhova, who tried nobly to mute her senior-ballerina grandeur, partnered by Kiril Melnikov, an apparent prince not altogether comfortable in avian clothing.

The Kirov seems to have no policy regarding sexual type-casting in the role of the evil fairy, Carabosse. Sometimes she is portrayed by a man. Here she was portrayed by Elena Sherstnova, most of whose curses and cackles were rendered ineffective by Sergeyev.

The house program, by the way, offers one delicious bit of Scottish-Russian trivia in Sherstnova’s biographical sketch. Another of her witchy specialties, we learn, is Medzh (sic) in “La Sylphide.” Anyone for Madge?

The four suitors were luxuriously cast, with Eldar Aliev, a principal danseur, as the foppish leader. The fatuous fairy-tale divertissements--what remained of them--were dispatched with elan. Gennadi Selutsky made Cattalabutte neither comic nor pathetic, just tiresome.

The sets of Simon Virsaladze involve fussy canvas paintings recreated from ancient sketches just before the designer’s death last year. The varying vistas--primitively lit and earnestly embellished with genuine, noisy water fountains--evoke a ponderous St. Petersburg rather than a fanciful fairyland. The costumes flirt half-heartedly with Renaissance images, and the wigs lend new meaning to the concept of dowdy.

In the pit, Dzhemal Dalgat offered perfunctory attention to Tchaikovsky’s needs while accommodating the dancers sympathetically. Despite some passing problems, the Pacific Symphony played with far more polish than the miserable pick-up band that had accompanied the Kirov at the Metropolitan Opera House. Stephen Erdody brought special distinction to the soulful cello solo in the Vision Scene.

Incidental intelligence:

--Although tight security measures were imposed upon the Kirov audience in New York, none were deemed necessary here.

--Any resemblance between the scheduled casting and the actual casting at curtain time is purely coincidental.

--A historic event occurred before the first performance. A dressy audience in deepest, darkest, most conservative Orange County rose en masse for the “Star-Spangled Banner” and for the Soviet national anthem. Talk about perestroika .