Russian revelation

The Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg paid a concentrated visit to the Barbican last week, performing four theatre pieces on three evenings. I failed to see the first, a concert performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s meretricious opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, so my palate was clear for the second evening, a double bill of Stravinsky, two of his supreme masterpieces, both dense, compact, overpowering in the energy and intensity they conveyed.

The first was the ballet (not danced) Les Noces, a precursor of minimalism, but laden with content and for all its repetitiveness and wilful ignoring of the changing moods of the text, indeed very largely of the characters who sing it, a work that conveys without expressing the anticipation, joyfulness, apprehension and pain of a wedding, both for the two participants and for their attendants. This is perhaps the one work in which Stravinsky achieved his aim of being interpreter-proof: the only aim for the performers is precision, accuracy, and this was achieved to stunning effect at the Barbican.