What Am I Seeing? The West Coast premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s ballet The Seasons. Created at American Ballet Theatre in the spring of 2019, this ballet reimagines a lost work by 19th-century choreographer Marius Petipa. Ratmansky is very interested in what’s called “ballet reconstruction,” a process of using notation and photographs to recreate Petipa’s works as precisely as possible. But for The Seasons, he takes a different approach, using the libretto of the ballet but completely reinventing its choreography.
What am I hearing? Alexander Glazunov’s The Seasons. Perhaps best known as Shostakovich’s teacher, Glazunov is sometimes overlooked as an artist, but two of his ballets, Raymonda and The Seasons, are among the most popular of his works.
What should I look for? Although he created all new choreography, Ratmansky preserved Petipa’s original libretto, so look for a whole cast of various beings on stage: Frost, Ice, and Hail; a Zephyr and a Rose; a Faun, the Spirit of the Corn, and Bacchus himself. The original cast was a who’s-who of famous ballet Imperial Ballet stars like Olga Probrazhenskaya, Matilde Kschessinskaya, Pavel Gerdt, Nikolai Legat, and Anna Pavlova. There’s a way that aspect of the ballet filters through to this version. It has many principal characters and principal parts, all full of technical challenges and requiring star turns of their dancers.