Danila: Andrei Yermakov
Katerina: Yekaterina Osmolkina
The Mistress of the Copper Mountain: Viktoria Tereshkina
Severian: Alexander Sergeev
A Young Gypsy Woman: Olga Belik
A Young Gypsy Man: Nail Yenikeyev
A graduate of the Leningrad School of Dance, Yuri Grigorovich commenced his stage career at the Kirov Theatre (today the Mariinsky Theatre) – initially as a ballet dancer and later as a choreographer. The ballet The Stone Flower (1957) was to be his first large-scale production for a major theatre. The young ballet-master already had experience of working on dances in operas and productions for a children’s ensemble, but the right to mount a ballet at the legendary Leningrad theatre was something he had to earn. Grigorovich created the choreography with the young dancers Irina Kolpakova (she rehearsed the role of Katerina), Alla Osipenko (the Mistress of the Copper Mountain), Alexander Gribov (Danila) and Anatoly Gridin (Severyan) in time they had free from their work in the theatre’s current repertoire. Only after highlights of the ballet-to-be which had been rehearsed were shown was the new production granted approval by the Artistic Board and included in the theatre’s official plans. Everyone worked with great passion on the ballet set to music by contemporary composer Sergei Prokofiev. Grigorovich and his senior colleague, the designer Simon Virsaladze, travelled to the Urals to become familiar with the homeland of Bazhov’s tales that were to come to life on-stage in The Stone Flower. The performers, by then used to drama-ballet productions that were modest in terms of their actual dancing, were enthralled with the choreographer’s generosity in the new ballet, where there were well-developed ensembles and stunning duets with almost acrobatic supports.
Audiences, too, gave the production an enthusiastic welcome, while lofty praise from respected colleagues in the arts as well as critics only served to reinforce the success of the debutante choreographer. Already his first attempt at staging a work for a major theatre brought Yuri Grigorovich great acclaim: The Stone Flower was taken up by the Bolshoi Theatre. And The Legend of Love, which followed after The Stone Flower, opened the door for him to become director of the ballet company of the country’s most important theatre, to spur him on to myriad new productions and achievements and led to his unofficial status as the leading choreographer of the Soviet Union. The Stone Flower marked the start of a magnificent and supremely intensive creative career and proved a useful springboard for its creator.
Premiere of Sergei Prokofiev's ballet choreographed by Leonid Lavrovsky – 12 February 1954, Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow
Premiere of the ballet choreographed by Yuri Grigorovich – 22 April 1957, the Leningrad Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre (Mariinsky Theatre)
Premiere of the revival at the Mariinsky Theatre: 6 December 2016
Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes
The performance has one interval
St Petersburg ballet lives through legends. They are remembered, they are things to be proud of and things to try to bring them back to life. The Stone Flower is one of them, a legend with a history dating back almost sixty years.
For the creators of this ballet, staged in 1957, The Stone Flower has remained in the mind as a beam of light, the light of first serious artistic triumphs. For Yuri Grigorovich it was his first major theatre production, and on a Russian theme, too, set to music by his much-admired Prokofiev. Moreover, it was in this opus that the creative duo with Simon Virsaladze was established, a tandem that would unsure the success of both for many years to come. For the first performers, very young and then known only in ballet circles – Irina Kolpakova, Alla Osipenko, Alexander Gribov and Anatoly Gridin – The Stone Flower made their names famous. They became the creators of roles for the first time rather than mere interpreters of long-existing choreographic texts, they created images. The characters that were conceived revealed their individual natures and the dancers came to be spoken of regularly. And in the context of the history of Russian ballet The Stone Flower was a ray of light – a step forwards from the undanceable nature of the genre of the drama ballet. Today, looking back through the years that much is evident. But back then in 1957 no-one was deliberately preparing any revolutions, it was just that a young choreographer and young dancers did something that they found interesting, and their interests differed from the preferences of the generation of the 1930s and 1940s.
"I remember those hours with great fondness, when together with the lead performers we almost never left the rehearsal hall," wrote Tatiana Vecheslova, the coach of the new ballet, "and all our free time was taken up with thoughts about the production. ‹…› There was never enough time – for work, for talks, for arguments."1 For Vecheslova who had only just stopped dancing, The Stone Flower was her first work as a coach, and this ballet opened up new doors to her. For the designer Virsaladze, the production after tales by Bazhov turned a new page in his artistic life. When preparing for the production, Grigorovich and he travelled to the Urals, and the Georgian Virsaladze discovered not the familiar Leningrad Russia but the village and folk Russia.
This general engagement with a search for the new, in addition to the talent of each creator, became a component part of the legend. And The Stone Flower very soon made his success a legend.
There was the inspiring praise for “the symphonic narrative” from the wise old mentor, the authoritative choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov, who had once sought this symphonism in dance in his own productions. The response about "the concord, harmonious blending of the music, the choreography and the set designs" from the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who knew himself what working on a ballet was. The general collection of praise was added to by the impressions of stage director Yuri Zavadsky. High praise is never awarded to every newcomer in the profession, but Grigorovich's The Stone Flower was taken to the Bolshoi Theatre – already in 1959 the production had been transferred to the country's main theatre. In Leningrad, if one believes the bare figures of theatre statistics, over thirty years The Stone Flower was one of the most attended productions, between 1957 and 1991 being performed one hundred and ninety-one times. Up until the early 1990s the legend inspired ever more new performers.
And for dancers of the generation of the 2010s who only know The Stone Flower through stories and beautiful old photographs on the walls at school, today the very name of Grigorovich is a legend, a synonym for the spectacular glory of Soviet ballet. The comments, indeed the very presence in the auditorium of a man who knew Stravinsky personally, who saw Balanchine dance on-stage and who heard the tales of Lifar about the production of Prodigal Son – these afford an opportunity to approach the legend. Olga Makarova
1 T. Vecheslova. I Am a Ballerina. Leningrad — Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964. P. 239.
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