Saint-Georges & Gautier, Adolphe Adam
English National Ballet
Palace Theatre, Manchester
October 30-November 2, 2024: 2 hrs 15 mins
We should all be grateful to English National Ballet for keeping faith with fans in the North of England by bringing classic ballets, done the proper way, to our theatres.
There’s value, of course, in productions done without a full corps de ballet or live orchestra (by Matthew Bourne’s companies for instance), but there’s nothing like a production with well constructed, substantial sets, ample resources of lighting and effects and the personnel, both on stage and in the pit, that these lasting and significant works were designed to have.
ENB has tried a different approach with Giselle: in 2016 they presented a ballet of that name, devised by Akram Khan; it had a framework from the original story and some clever referencing of both the music of the original Adolphe Adam score and the traditional choreography, but really it was a completely new work, the well-known title little more than a flag of convenience.
That production had its enthusiasts, but I for one am glad the company have now returned to the 1971 production by Mary Skeaping, which was always a jewel in the company’s crown. It was carefully researched and incorporated not just elements of the original, lost in later versions, but also the best of the interpolations made by later choreographers, including Marius Petipa.
The ballet is of its time, which was 1841; Romantic in its combination of a fascination with the imagined beauties of rural village life and also the ethereal and spooky (we’d call that “gothic” now). The work was created to showcase the skills of one of the first virtuosa prima ballerinas, Carlotta Grisi, and the use of extensive dancing in the then new technique of balancing en pointe. That makes the ballet crucial to the whole development of the art, and a great vehicle still for dancers of real brilliance.
ENB brings precisely that to this revival, seen in Liverpool last week on this all-too-brief trip north. The corps de ballet is of top quality performers from around the globe, and the soloists we saw on opening night were superb. Erina Takahashi and Francesco Gabriele Frola taking the leading roles of Giselle and Albrecht with technical finesse and, in her case, much expressive ability (the piece requires mime skills as well as dancing ones, as its first-half story moves along at quite a pace). His technique was superbly strong, and her changes of characterisation, from flirtatious to scared to impassioned to other-worldly, are vivid.
The ”peasant pas de deux” – an interpolation with little function in the story – provides a chance for two other gifted soloists to show what they can do, and Ivana Bueno and Lorenzo Trossello are beautiful of line in that. There are nice characterisations from Laura Hussey (as Berthe, Giselle’s mum) and James Streeter (a lordly-gracious-and-just-a-bit-pompous Prince). In the second part Julia Conway makes her role debut with due solemnity as the imperiously weird Myrta, mistress of the undead.
That part of the ballet, incidentally, featuring the mythical Wilis (pronounced “Vilis”), the spirits of deceased brides who return at night to haunt the men they once loved, is probably the origin of the saying “It gives me the willies”: they need to be seriously spooky, and are.
Giselle continues to stimulate us because it’s not just a simple tale of goody and baddy: Albrecht, the apparent hero, is actually a bit of a rotter, because he engages Giselle’s affections in the bucolic first part when he is actually engaged to marry another.
We sympathise more with Hilarion (well danced by Henry Dowden in the cast we saw), Giselle’s first hopeful suitor. Is Albrecht’s haunted fate in the second part deserved, despite Giselle’s love for him continuing from beyond the grave? Maybe that’s his real punishment … You make up your own mind.
Conductor Maria Seletskaja keeps the ENB Philharmonic on its toes after a slightly too energetic opening, drawing enviable variety of tone and some exciting crescendos.
Info and tickets here
