Kremlin Leaps In to Revitalize Bolshoi

The Bolshoi Theater’s very name means “big,” and nothing about it is less than gargantuan--not its outsize productions, not its financial losses and not its turmoil.

As the rest of Russia was preoccupied with fires, bombs and a submarine sinking, the Kremlin last week carried out a kind of coup at what may be the world’s most famous ballet and opera company: On Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin fired the theater’s artistic director and signed an order in effect ending the independence that the theater had enjoyed since shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

On Saturday, the Kremlin installed its new team: Anatoly G. Iksanov, a hard-nosed theater and TV executive, is the new general director, and the much-admired conductor Gennady N. Rozhdestvensky is the artistic director.

“When I told people I was accepting this job, they said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’ ” Rozhdestvensky told a theater full of anxious dancers, singers, musicians and technicians. “But when it comes to art, you have to be a little crazy.”

Like so much else in Russia these days, the Bolshoi’s reputation for greatness has outlasted its performance. Its repertoire is decades old, and its few recent attempts at new productions have largely flopped.

Meanwhile, despite having one of the most marketable names in international cultural circles and despite a steady flow of foreign tourists willing to pay top dollar for a seat in its grandiose pink plaster edifice, the theater has been unable to make ends meet. Many top artists earn $150 a month, miserly by Western standards. The theater is dangerously run down, but a long-planned renovation has been stalled for years by a lack of funds.

The ballet’s U.S. tour this summer, which included a week of performances each in Los Angeles and Orange County, earned mixed reviews. The Times’ dance critic, Lewis Segal, wrote that “one-note portrayals diminished the repertory night after night, with the Bolshoi’s tradition of blazing individuality replaced all too often by drab, cookie-cutter interpretations.”

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Valentina I. Matviyenko told the theater company Saturday that the leadership change and the decision to bring the operation back under the oversight of the Ministry of Culture are designed to end the Bolshoi’s creative decline and financial woes.

“The problems facing the theater at this time demand a new approach,” she said to the artists assembled in the theater’s ornate red-and-gold brocade hall. “We all must join together to do everything possible so that the most important theater in our country, our pride and joy, becomes everything it ought to be.”

Performers Cheer New Artistic Director

For the most part, Bolshoi artists welcomed Rozhdestvensky’s appointment. They gave him a round of applause so vigorous and warm that his eyes welled with tears.

“We have been hoping all these years for the best, and I continue to believe that we will live to see better times,” said opera soloist Yuri Vedeneyev. “The coming of such a great master as Rozhdestvensky makes this hope somewhat more realistic.”

Rozhdestvensky, 69, is the first artistic director in nearly four decades who did not come from the theater’s ballet side. Rozhdestvensky studied with his father--also a conductor--at the Moscow Conservatory and made his own conducting debut at the Bolshoi at the age of 20. He was the theater’s principal conductor from 1964 to 1970.

Starting in 1974, Rozhdestvensky managed the rare feat of pursuing a career both inside and outside the Soviet Union, serving as artistic director of the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. He maintains a busy schedule of concerts and recordings, which he acknowledges that he will have to curb.

“Some people consider me a ‘living legend’--that is, a dinosaur. But I don’t feel like a dinosaur. I feel more like a mammoth,” he said. “Otherwise, I would never have taken the heavy weight of this job on my shoulders.”

Throughout its 224-year history, the Bolshoi’s fortunes have leaped and dropped as dramatically as a twirling ballerina. In imperial times, the Bolshoi tended to play second fiddle to St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater. But its fortunes changed mightily after the Bolsheviks moved the capital back to Moscow and, determined to develop a powerful Soviet cultural corps, began to pour resources into the Bolshoi.

Theater Danced Into Spotlight in the 1950s

The theater’s modern reputation was made in 1956 when the ballet company went on tour to London and mesmerized audiences with its grandiose stagings and technical virtuosity. For the next 35 years, mostly under the leadership of Yuri Grigorovich, a dancer who became artistic director in 1964, the Bolshoi’s reputation grew as big as its name. The fact that the company was shrouded by the Iron Curtain and toured infrequently only enhanced its intrigue.

But Grigorovich, while credited with building the theater into a world-class institution, is also widely blamed for starting its decline. An autocrat by nature, he stayed in his job long after his own creativity had dried up. Although he had not staged a single new ballet since 1982, he was not ousted until 1995.

The last few years of his tenure were critical for the Bolshoi. In 1992, the Bolshoi became the only state-sponsored theater in Russia to shed the oversight of the Ministry of Culture.

“In 1992, the theater was given almost total freedom and independence,” said Gediminas Taranda, a former Bolshoi ballet star who split with Grigorovich and is now artistic director of the second-tier Imperial Russian Ballet company. “But since then, we haven’t seen serious signs of real artistic success, let alone any signs of commercial success.”

Grigorovich’s successor was Vladimir Vasilyev, one of the company’s best-loved ballet soloists who over the years became his former mentor’s chief rival. Vasilyev took over in 1995 but failed to reverse the theater’s fortunes.

“Vasilyev is a great artist, but he really is too kind and trusting for the job,” said music critic Anatoly Agamirov. “In this job, you need to be tough as nails.”

Vasilyev’s recent productions of “Swan Lake” and “The Pharaoh’s Daughter” earned the critics’ particular disdain. And many in the opera company felt that he directed too much money and attention toward the ballet side.

But perhaps his most serious failure was his inability to keep the theater’s reconstruction on track. The project, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is supposed to take place in two stages: building a $400-million new theater in a neighboring building and then relocating the company there while the main theater is closed for $200 million in repairs. But while ground for the new theater was broken in 1995, money ran short and construction has nearly ground to a halt. Projections suggest that the process will drag out at least until 2005.

Meanwhile, the condition of the 144-year-old landmark building--a columned pink neoclassical temple crowned with a statue of Apollo driving his chariot--is so dire that Britain’s Royal Ballet once refused to dance on its stage, considering it unsafe. A peek beneath the stage floor reveals a dark tangle of winches and cables that more resembles a medieval torture chamber than a world-class theater.

It remains to be seen whether Iksanov, the new general director, will have better luck raising funds. But his credentials look promising: For 20 years, he worked at the Bolshoi Drama Theater in St. Petersburg, helping build it into the city’s premier drama theater and overseeing a major renovation of its building. For the past two years, he has been financial director of the successful “Kultura” TV station, which has made money despite its rather predictable lineup of classical music and dance programming.

But if past is precedent, the melodrama both on and off the Bolshoi’s famous stage is unlikely to end any time soon.

“We’re very upset at the way this all came about,” said Svetlana Sherbinina, a retired ballerina who danced with the theater for 25 years. “But Rozhdestvensky is of course a tremendous person. All our hopes now lie with him.”

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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.