TV REVIEW : MacMillan’s ‘Winter Dreams’ Gets a Fresh Look on A

Kenneth MacMillan’s one-act ballet “Winter Dreams” looks better in the 1992 BBC production shown tonight at 6 and 10 on A&E; cable than it did when danced by the same Royal Ballet cast at the Orange County Performing Arts Center a year earlier.

For television, MacMillan and director Derek Bailey replaced the single, claustrophobic stage set with interiors and exteriors designed by Eric Walmsley. Besides providing visual variety, the new environment allows the story (based on Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”) to be fluidly evoked through flashbacks and interior monologues rather than becoming a dogged linear narrative as it did in the theater.

“Winter Dreams” began as a showpiece pas de deux, with the rest of the work created later--in a different style. The problem remains but Darcey Bussell and ex-Bolshoi firebrand Irek Mukhamedov make the sequence genuinely thrilling.

The major roles showcase a new generation of Covent Garden favorites (especially Bussell and Viviana Durante) along with Royal veterans (among them Anthony Dowell and Derek Rencher). Arguably, however, 71-year-old Gerd Larsen leaves everyone else invisible in her scenes as the nanny.

Because the ballet uses Tchaikovsky piano pieces (plus traditional Russian ballads arranged for guitar ensemble), A&E; is showing it as part of “The Tchaikovsky Cycle.” Opening the telecast: a soulful 1991 performance of the “1812” Overture by the Moscow Radio Symphony under Vladimir Fedoseyev. No fireworks, artillery or cathedral bells: just the resources of a fine orchestra at a point in Russsian history no less turbulent than the one Tchaikovsky depicted.

The same forces also play the D-major Violin Concerto, with Kyoko Takezawa sounding exquisite in lyric solo passages, less satisfying elsewhere.