★★★★ La fille mal gardée’ by Frederic Ashton was dropped from this year’s season by the Ballet del Colón to replace it with a work of a very different nature: ‘Onegin’ (pronounced ‘Onegin’, as it should be transliterated). Apart from the very common custom of changing programming that has already been announced to the public, who bought their subscription based on those announcements, it would have been interesting for the company to address a title that has been missing from the repertoire for more than two decades, and that He appears in large casts such as the Royal Ballet in London. It is not easy at all to approach comedy properly, a genre misrepresented as ‘minor’, and this would have been a good challenge for a generation that urgently needs to develop acting skills.
Thus, ‘Onegin’, created by John Cranko in 1965, came on stage. Since its premiere at the Teatro Colón in 1979 by the Stuttgart Ballet, with the legendary Marcia Haydée and Richard Cragun at the helm, the ballet has been and It is a favorite of performers and audiences. Cranko’s theatrical sense is masterfully revealed here: his handling of time is combined with a notable technical difficulty, especially in the duets of the protagonists. At the same time, the group work is detailed and impressive. The choreographer gives an important role to symbols, for example letters and mirrors. In the first act, Madame Larina and her daughters find different emotions before quicksilver; and Onegin appears in Tatiana’s dreams from a mirror. The letter that Tatiana writes to Onegin ends up broken by his hands, and vice versa in the last act as, once again, a mirrored play of emotions. The novel in verse that Pushkin wrote in the 19th century is renewed by Cranko, but faithfully maintaining the characteristics of the characters and the social painting of the time.
The leading dancers from Stuttgart Elisa Badenes and Martí Paixà took on the leading roles with brilliant technical and dramatic resources, the product of assimilating the tradition of their original company. At his side, the young Rocío Agüero and Jiva Velázquez endowed Olga and Lenski with freshness and intensity, respectively. All the comprimarios imagined by Cranko to describe the bourgeois society of imperial Russia were magnificently embodied by the most experienced dancers of the Stable Ballet.
The Philharmonic Orchestra did a very good job guided by Tara Simoncic.
