25 July 2016

Bolshoi Ballet back in London for another thrilling three-week season!

The Bolshoi Ballet ‘brand’ was born sixty years ago during the Company’s first foreign tour. The tour was to London and the date was 1956. The Bolshoi Ballet appeared at The Royal Opera House where the ovations brought the house down and aroused a second wave of interest in ballet in general and in Russian ballet, in particular (the stimulus for the first wave was, of course, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes). It was the 1956 tour which made the Company’s name and won for it worldwide recognition. Ten year’s ago our Company’s faithful impresarios, Lilian and Victor Hochhauser, celebrated the golden jubilee of the legendary 1956 tour, by another major Bolshoi Ballet Company London season. And this year brings a big, new Bolshoi Ballet London tour and the diamond jubilee of the union between our Company, the Hochhausers and The Royal Opera House. And it is in these very words – “Bolshoi Ballet Diamond Jubilee” – that our tour is advertised on The Royal Opera House web-site. 

As is usually the case with a tour to one of the world’s great ballet ‘hubs’, the programme will include both classical works and recent additions to the repertoire. We are taking Swan Lake, the recently restaged Don Quixote, Le Corsaire, in a reworking by Alexei Ratmansky and Yuri Burlaka (2007), a Soviet era hit The Flames of Paris in a revival (2008) by Ratmansky, and The Taming of the Shrew (2014), specially staged for the Bolshoi by Jean-Christophe Maillot. Both Le Corsaire and The Flames of Paris have already been on tour to England but, to-date, The Taming of the Shrew (excluding a visit to St. Petersburg and to the Principality of Monaco, where the choreographer lives), has only been seen on screen, and it is therefore awaited with special interest.