BRB, 23/11/2022

Tchaikovsky : The Nutcracker

Artists of Birmingham Royal Ballet

Royal Ballet Sinfonia

Philip Ellis

 

To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Birmingham Royal Ballet gave their hit Christmas show, The Nutcracker, a head-to-toe overhaul, refurbishing all sets and costumes, with the full cooperation of the original designer, John Macfarlane, so the stage lights went up on a particularly vivid, rich, plum red living room, and the flowered backdrop of Act 2 glowed with life.  It's been eleven years since I last saw this live in the Birmingham Hippodrome, for which it was conceived, but I was there in its first year, and while it's certainly good to see the whole thing refreshed, it has never lost its appeal, and remains the most magical, engaging production of Nutcracker that I know.  The audiences in Birmingham may be very familiar with it, but when the curtain goes up on Act 2, and that great goose crosses the night sky, there is still a quiet sigh of wonder.

The Nutcracker, Act 2
© Birmingham Royal Ballet, 2022

In the interim, though, and even since I saw the company live last year, there are a lot of new names amongst the principals and soloists.  As I'd noted at Romeo and Juliet last year, there were quite a few small technical errors amongst the soloists, tours en l'air a little off the vertical from some of the boys, or pirouettes fallen out of half a beat early from a couple of the girls.  On the other hand, the corps was excellent, the patterning of the Snowflake Waltz faultlessly delivered, with a show of perfect alignment that I have not often seen from this company or, indeed, many another.  In a similar vein, there was a certain amount of scrappy playing in the orchestra, from the trumpets near the start, and from the winds in general, but overall its heart was very much in the right place, and apart from the Grand Pas, which was on the slow side, conductor Philip Ellis had made judicious choices of tempo.  

Because of the way this particular version is set up, the Sugar Plum Fairy both is, and is not, Clara, that is, in the story she is a temporarily transformed Clara, but it's a different ballerina dancing the role.  This makes it particularly difficult to find an emotional core to the pas de deux, it places Clara's personal aspirations (she's a ballet student, with a former ballerina for a mother) above her emotional growth, when the story is really about the transition from childhood to adulthood.  It's perhaps the one flaw in Sir Peter Wright's production, and it means that the Grand Pas tends to be mostly a very beautiful exercise in technique, in the grandest Russian Imperial style.  Tonight, Beatrice Parma and Tzu-Chao Chou were the principals, and gave an elegant performance, but a little soft-grained, which was the fault of the slow tempo.  Because of the lack of emotional core, you want to really see a momentary triumph of style over substance, and there's an imperiousness to the classical Russian style that the right tempo in the orchestra makes very clear.  Slow it down, and the backbone softens a little too much.

Imperious, however, was the perfect adjective for Gabriel Anderson's Drosselmeyer, swirling his cloak  impressively, arrogant, assured and charismatic, exactly what was wanted for this enigmatic character, and the best I've seen from this company in quite a while.  The two Fairies, Lucy Waine (Snow) and especially Yaoquian Shang (Rose) were delightful, feather-light and enchanting, while Miki Mizutani was an appealing Clara, particularly in the second act where she caught the balance between being almost a woman, yet still a child at times, very well indeed.

So here's to another 30 years of this beautiful production, and may its spell over our hearts never fade.

[Next : 24th November]