What is it with ballet and birds? We have the Swan Queen, the Black Swan, the Dying Swan… and the Firebird. The latter makes its return to the Covent Garden stage in a mixed bill with a distinctly Russian flavour.
On opening night, Yasmine Naghdi made her debut in the title role. Haughty and imperious, with a stunning jump and fluttering hands, she is a bird with a heart of stone, who only assists the Tsarevich to gain her freedom.
The ballet is more of a historical curiosity than anything else. Fokine’s choreography looks stylised and simplistic, and certainly not everyone’s glass of vodka, but The Firebird is worth seeing alone for its glorious original 1926 designs by Natalia Gonacharova. The final tableau, in which the Tsarevich is united with his bride, is a visual wonder: there is no dancing, just Stravinsky’s powerful music soaring to a thunderous conclusion.
Sir Frederick Ashton’s A Month in the Country, set to Chopin, distils the essence of Turgenev’s play into fifty minutes of dance drama. It is all Russian melancholy and broken hearts.
