The Queen of Spades

In the year of the 225^th anniversary of Alexander Pushkin’s birth, the theatre named after the poet offered viewers a study: as one of the most difficult texts for the stage, Pushkin’s texts can be read in different ways by means of opera and ballet. Following Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades staged by Valery Fokin, the repertoire included the play The Queen of Spades. Ballet, the world premiere commissioned by the Nizhny Novgorod Opera and Ballet Theatre.
The ballet was written by the composer Yuri Krasavin, the author of symphonic and chamber pieces, music for the films Tsar and Brest Fortress, ballets Magrittomania, Paquita, Dancemania, as well as The Queen of Spades, composed for the Bolshoi Theatre of Russia on themes by Tchaikovsky. In Nizhny Novgorod a completely different Queen by Krasavin has performed. This is an original score, in which the author, in his own words, “tried to get used to the role of a ballet composer of the 19^th century, writing for legs.” The honour of the first performance belongs to the conductor-director Fyodor Lednev.
The authors follow Pushkin’s text, however they, unlike the story, offer audiences to take the point of view of its central character – the military engineer Hermann, a cold-blooded and calculating man but experiencing a change of consciousness. Alyona Pikalova, Tatiana Noginova and Konstantin Binkin – artists who have largely defined the visual structure of modern Russian ballet – came up with the image of Pushkin’s and timeless St Petersburg.
The choreography was composed by Maxim Petrov, a former dancer of the Mariinsky Ballet and now Artistic Director of the Ural Ballet in Yekaterinburg, a winner of the Golden Mask and the author of the beloved by St Petersburg audience The Fairy’s Kiss and Le Divertissement du roi.