If eight weeks in lockdown have brought out my baser impulses (biscuits by the sleeve, total renunciation of waistbands), it’s also deepened my appetite for culture at its plushest, liveliest heights. It’s not just beaches and brunches I’m craving as spring turns to summer and I round off my second month of working supine on the couch; it’s the sheen of studio lights on the Rothkos at Tate Modern, the whooshing sound when a dancer catapults herself across the Sadler’s Wells stage. Fortunately, watching the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake on Marquee TV last week — the world’s favourite ballet by the world’s foremost company — went some way in filling that void.
Yuri Grigorovich’s 2001 production is performed to perfection here, with a consummate turn from prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova. But the real triumph is the show’s faith in its own brilliance — the easy confidence of the choreography, the assertive grandeur of every set piece, from the fairy-tale castle (complete with a high-flying harlequin) to the moonlit lake where Prince Siegfried meets his Swan Queen.
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