Swan Lake

Swan Lake ballet. Music by Tchaikovsky. Book by V. P. Begitchev and Vasily Geltzer. Choreographed and directed by Heintz Spoerli (after Marius Petipa) at the Zurich Opera House in 2009. Stars Polina Semionova, Stanislav Jermakov, Arsen Mehrabyan, Karin Pellmont, Galina Mihaylova, Arman Grigoryan, Véronique Tamaccio, Sarah-Jane Brodbeck, Maria Seletskaja, Vittoria Valerio, Aliya Tanykpayeva, Jiayong Sun, Vahe Martirosyan, Yen Han, Iker Murillo, Oleksandr Kirichenko, Sergiy Kirichenkoo, Daniel Mulligan, and Yuriy Volk. Vladimir Fedoseyev conducts the Zurich Opera Orchestra. Sets by Erich Wonder; costumes by Florence von Gerkan; lighting by Martin Gebhardt; directed for TV and video by Andy Sommer. Released  2010, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound.  Grade: B+

It's July 2010,  and we already have Swan Lake in HDVDs from the Paris Opera Ballet (Opus Arte), the Mariinsky Ballet (Decca), and the Royal Ballet (Opus Arte). So it took courage for the Zurich Opera Ballet (local market of about 2,000,000 people) to make and try to sell an HDVD against this kind of competition, especially when dancemaker Heintz Spoerli himself states that the Zurich Opera Company is almost too small to stage Swan Lake. This courage has been rewarded, because subject disc is the best Swan Lake that exists now as runner up to the Paris Opera Ballet HDVD (which is the best ballet video ever made).

Spoerli pulled this off with two moves. First he imported Prima Ballerina Polina Semionova to dance Odette/Odile. Second, he ruthlessly cut away at the book, music, and choreography of Swan Lake until he shaped a contemporary work (as lean as Semionova) that could be covered by his young troupe. Everybody in the company had a role, every role was vital, and you can sense do-or-die bravado in the performance. For the rest of this mini-review, I'll refer to this production as Swan Lite.

What had to be cut to get to Swan Lite? Here's the list: 12 swans (there are 20 on the Zurich stage v. 32 in most productions), all character dancers (no jester, etc.), the tutor (played in Zurich as alter ego of Rothbart), 2 princesses from foreign lands (4 instead of 6), the owl suit, most ethnic costumes, the crossbows and other props (except lots of chairs), all mime scenes, Siegfried's oath to love Odette, and about 15 minutes of music (here 125 minutes v. 140 minutes in the Paris Opera Ballet performance). This show moves fast, and you are invited to concentrate on enjoying the dancing and to not worry about whether there will be a happy or sad ending. Spoerli assumes you generally know the plot, and he doesn't sweat the details. (Don't worry---I'm not going to get into Spoerli's ending.)

At first, I resisted the Swan Lite approach, but I soon found that it was refreshing. Semionova, a movie-star-beautiful woman, is the best Odette/Odile on any of the four HDVDs we now have. The men stars are adequate for the Swan Lite approach. It's fun to see so many young dancers get a chance to appear in this Holy Grail ballet. But Yen Han, one of the Zurich senior ballerinas, is the one who may knock you over with her Russian dance (Chapter 32). This dance by Han is alone worth the price of the HDVD.

We now take excellent sound for granted in our HDVDs, and almost all of the ballet and opera orchestras sound good. But the Zurich Opera Orchestra seems to be especially pungent and provocative on this disc. The recording is very close and every instrument is heard with impressive clarity and detail. I think Fedoseyev slows much of the music down a bit, which may make things a bit easier on the dancers and gives us more time to savor the score. On the other hand, the lighting was dark for this production. However successful this may have been to the live audience, it made for tough shooting with the high-definition cameras. As a result, some of the video images are poor and there are motion artifacts that could have been avoided with brighter lighting.

To sum up, if you have no HDVD of Swan Lake, get the real-deal Paris Opera Ballet version. For a shorter modern alternative, try the Zurich disc. If you insist that Rothbart be a magician who turns himself into an owl, you will probably like the Mariinsky show. Avoid the Royal Opera version, which is now woefully dated and shabby looking. Henry McFadyen Jr July 2010