Tonight (although I am sure it will be a few days before this post sees the light of day) I went to the opening night of Cendrillon - Prokofiev’s ballet choreographed by Rudolf Noureev (aka Nureyev in the English-speaking world), again at Opera Bastille. I first started attending ballets back when I lived in Dresden, 2013-2016. Ah the fond memories of the Semperoper… Remains one of my favorite opera houses to this day, but I digress. Back to Cinderella!
Image credit: Yonathan Kellerman / OnP
Ever since I discovered the wonderful over-the-top operatic acting, I have been a lot more into opera than I am into ballet. Still, it is good to change things up every once in awhile, and Cendrillon is certainly a fine way to do just that. Not mind-blowing by any means, but entertaining, speckled with funny moments, and undeniably pretty. During an opera (at least ones I enjoy) I tend to be too engrossed in the story to pay much attention to the music, but while watching a ballet, my mind tends to wander. Wandering to Sergei Prokofiev’s music is an adventure, and a whimsical one at that :) The starting chords gave me a strong sense of déjà entendu: but where could I have heard it before? I was never one for classical music growing up. Reading, on the other hand, has been been my passion from a young age, and before that there were audio books. Twenty five years ago these came in the form of vinyl records. One of those vinyls I used to listen to as a small kid living on a naval base in the Far East of Russia was Cinderella, an audio fairy-tale set to music excerpts from Prokofiev’s 1940s ballet. I wonder what I would have thought if someone told me back then that the next time I would hear those tunes would be in a Parisian opera house :)
Cendrillon. Apparently that’s just French for Cinderella, but when I first heard it, I figured that it was some sort of a male counterpart. That not being the case, here comes a twist within a twist: in a way, Cendrillon was a tribute to Noureev’s own rocky road to success - from a soviet defector in 1961 to director and chief choreographer of the Paris Opera Ballet up until 1992, how is that for a Cinderfellow story!
To keep up with the times, in Noureev’s creation Cinderella gets transplanted into Hollywood, her fairy godmother gets replaced with a movie producer, ball with a film set, and prince with who appears to be a leading movie star. And who needs a wedding when you can sign a movie contract? Surprisingly, despite these seemingly major changes to Perrault’s story, the atmosphere and the general feeling of the original remain untouched. Could I be biased because I heard Prokofiev’s music while listening to the unedited fairytale in my childhood? Maybe. Is the music alone, visual charm of the experience aside, worth braving the cold November rain? It is.
My final highly subjective verdict: 6/10 (nice to see)
XOXO
Olga