Choreography by Leonid Yakobson
Libretto by Ahmed Faizi and Leonid Yakobson after motifs from Tatar folk tales
Full revival of the 1950 production
Musical Director and Conductor – Valery Gergiev
Designers: Alexander Ptushko, Lev Milchin & Ivan Ivanov-Vano
Ballet Coaches – , Tatiana Terekhova,
Radjepmyrat Abdyev, Nina Ukhova, Alexander Matveyev & Annelina Kashirina
Principal Coach – Vyacheslav Khomyakov
Revival Designer – Batozhan Dashitsyrenov
Lighting Designer – Alexander Naumov
Costume Revival Designer and Technician – Tatiana Mashkova
Musical Preparation – Lyudmila Sveshnikova
World premiere of the second version of the ballet Shurale (under the title Ali-Batyr): Kirov Theatre of Opera and Ballet, Leningrad, 28 May 1950
The Performance has two intermissions
Choreography by Leonid Yakobson features a combination of dance, drama and pantomime. It has a careful attitude to the era of storytelling and original details of plots.
SYNOPSIS
Act I
In a dense forest, the evil master of the woods Shurale is inside the trunk of a tree.
Ali-Batyr, a young hunter, appears in the forest clearing. Seeing a bird fly past, he seizes his bow and arrow and sets off after the bird. Shurale emerges from his lair. All the wood spirits that he rules awake. Genies, witches and evil spirits entertain their master with dances.
As the sun begins to rise, the evil spirits hide. A flock of birds comes down on the clearing. They spread their wings and transform into young maidens. The girls frolic through the forest. The last to abandon her wings, the beautiful Syuimbike follows them into the woods. Shurale, keeping an eye on her from behind a tree, steals the wings and drags them back to his lair.
The girls emerge from the woods. They perform merry round dances in the clearing. Unexpectedly, Shurale jumps out at them from behind the tree. Startled and frightened, the girls pick up their wings and, transformed into birds, take to the skies. Only Syuimbike is left to wander around, having been unable to find her wings. Shurale orders the evil spirits to surround the girl. She is a prisoner and terrified. Shurale is prepared to celebrate his victory, but Batyr and rushes out from the forest and hurries to Syuimbike’s assistance. The furious Shurale wishes to strangle Batyr, but the youth knocks the monster down to the ground with one powerful blow.
In vain, Syuimbike and her saviour look for the wings everywhere. Tired of the fruitless search, in torment Syuimbike drops to the ground and falls asleep. Batyr carefully picks up the sleeping bird-maiden and leaves with her.
The defeated Shurale threatens Batyr with a pitiless revenge for having kidnapped the bird-maiden from him.
Act II
Batyr’s courtyard. All the fellow-villagers have come to a banquet in honour of Batyr and the beautiful Syuimbike. The guests make merry and the children romp around. The bride alone is sad. Syuimbike is unable to forget her lost wings. Batyr tries to distract the girl from her gloomy thoughts. But neither the Dzhigits’ dances nor the maidens’ round dances bring any cheer to Syuimbike.
The celebration ends. The guests depart. Unnoticed by anyone, Shurale slips into the courtyard. Seizing a suitable moment, he throws Syuimbike her wings. In delight, the girl hugs them to her breast and wants to fly off, but in indecision she stops: she would be saddened to abandon her saviour. But the desire to take to the skies is stronger. Syuimbike takes to the air in flight.
Immediately she is surrounded by a flock of carrion crows sent by Shurale. The bird makes a bid for freedom, but the carrion-crows force her to fly towards the lair of their master.
Batyr enters the courtyard. He sees the poor bird flying away in the sky, beating her wings inside the circle of black crows. Seizing an incandescent torch, Batyr follows in pursuit.
Act III
Shurale’s lair. Here the bird-maiden is languishing in captivity. But Shurale cannot break Syuimbike’s iron will and the girl rebuffs his advances. In fury, Shurale wishes to give her to the evil wood spirits to be torn to pieces.
At this instant, Batyr runs onto the clearing with a flaming torch in his hand. At Shurale’s demand, all the witches, genies and Shurale’s minions attack the youth. Batyr then sets light to Shurale’s lair. The evil spirits and Shurale perish in the fiery flames.
Batyr and Syuimbike are alone amidst the storming inferno. Batyr hands the maiden her wings – the only way to salvation. But Syuimbike does not wish to abandon her beloved. She throws her wings into the flames – let them both perish in fire. Then the forest fire suddenly dies away. Free of the evil spirits, the forest is miraculously transformed. Batyr’s parents and the two matchmakers appear. They wish happiness to the groom and his bride.
the return of the fairytale ballet Shurale
to the Mariinsky Theatre’s repertoire
to music by Tatar composer Farid Yarullin
and with choreography by the legendary Leonid Yakobson
The basis of the libretto comes from Tatar folk fairytales and the classical Tatar poet Gabdulla Tukai’s Shurale about the bird-maiden Syuimbike, the intrepid hunter Ali-Batyr and the evil Shurale (in Tatar mythology he is an evil wood spirit in the guise of a man with a horn on his forehead and long fingers.
The history of the ballet’s creation goes back to the 1930s. In 1934 the decision was made to found an opera and ballet theatre in Kazan. Immediately, the Tatar Opera Studio was set up at the Moscow Conservatoire, comprising student composers, among them the twenty-year-old Farid Yarullin. While still in Moscow, Yarullin began composing music on themes from fairytales and poems by Tukai. Shurale, a wood-goblin in Tatar folklore and a character in the eponymous poetic fairytale by Tukai, formed the focal point of the libretto written by the young man of letters Ahmed Faizi. Soon the ballet Shurale was included in the new theatre’s repertoire plan, and the premiere of the ballet was set for August 1941. Leonid Yakobson was dispatched to Kazan for work on the ballet having been appointed production choreographer of the first national Tatar ballet. Throwing himself into the task, the choreographer rewove the material the librettist had created. Rejecting the secondary plotlines, he picked out and intensified the main one, he dramatised the conflict and expanded the images of the protagonists. For Yarullin, these amendments signified a new round of work: he had to rework what had been written in a very short space of time and complete numerous new sections. To this day there are stories that for this purpose he was locked in a room in the Soviet Hotel, which he fled by shinning down a drainpipe. At last, by June the clavier manuscript was finished, but its full orchestration was delayed by the War. Composer Farid Yarullin died at the front in October 1943. In Kazan, the ballet was rehearsed for production and staged in March 1945, but with alternative choreography.
Yakobson was given the opportunity to complete the work he began, albeit in 1950, when the decision was taken to stage Shurale in Leningrad. A new version of the ballet was created for the Kirov Theatre: the libretto was completely reworked, and the score totally re-orchestrated (by Vladimir Vlasov and Vladimir Fere).
One year after the Leningrad premiere, Yakobson’s ballet received the State Prize, and five years after that it was transferred to the Bolshoi Theatre. In Leningrad the role of Syuimbike was danced by Alla Shelest, Natalia Dudinskaya and Inna Zubkovskaya, that of Ali-Batyr by Boris Bregvadze, Konstantin Sergeyev and Askold Makarov and that of Shurale by Igor Belsky and Robert Gerbek; later, in revivals in Moscow, the ballet dazzled with the presence of Maya Plisetskaya, Marina Kondratieva and Vladimir Vasiliev. In other cities and in productions by other choreographers, the ballet was staged over twenty times from the 50s to the 70s, but in the history of ballet it has gone down first and foremost as a work by Yakobson.
Among those rehearsing for the premiere are Yevgenia Obraztsova and Yekaterina Osmolkina (Syuimbike), Mikhail Lobukhin and Denis Matvienko (Ali-Batyr), Leonid Sarafanov, Alexander Sergeyev and Islom Baimuradov (Shurale) and other soloists of the ballet company.
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