Magic of the Bolshoi [VHS]

Irksome editing, great performances
This retrospective covers performances from the 1930's through the 1980's. A number of selections are very short and start or finish at illogical points. However, the performances themselves are very good.The first 7 excerpts are from various performances of Sleeping Beauty. The artists include Liudmila Semenyaka and Alexander Vetrov, Maya Plisetskaya and Nikolai Fadeyechev, Raisa Struchkova, Ekaterina Maximova and Vladimir Vasiliev. This is followed by a group of "historical clips," dating from the '30s to the '60s. The highlights of this section for me were (1) Galina Ulanova and Fadeyechev in the first act of Giselle and (2) a variation from Laurencia performed by Plisetskaya. This is my favorite solo of hers, as it is what she did best: big leaps, broad movements, Spanish flavor.Next is a group of excerpts from Romeo and Juliet, again with various casts: Maximova, Plisetskaya, Ulanova and Mikhail Gabovich, Natalia Bessmertnova and Mikhail Lavrovsky. The final group of excerpts is from Don Quixote, with Nina Ananiashvili, Plisetskaya, Nadezhda Pavlova and Vyacheslav Gordeyev, and Maximova and Vasiliev.What's most unusual about this tape is the excerpts from the 1983 Asaf Messerer Gala. Messerer (Plisetskaya's uncle) was a principal dancer with the Bolshoi, which he joined in the 1920's. Upon his retirement from the stage, he spent many years as a teacher and ballet master at the Bolshoi school. This section opens with the members of the company, onstage but in practice clothes, doing pliés at the barre at Messerer's direction. (The somewhat distorted positions of some of the dancers brought back memories of a Kirov training film I saw in the late '60s. Unlike the method my teachers used--starting with your body correctly aligned and only then increasing your turnout and extension--the Bolshoi/Kirov method starts by forcing your feet into a perfect 180-degree turnout, or getting your leg all the way to the side in à la seconde, and only then working to get your alignment as correct as possible, a method that can only succeed when you have the best bodies to work with--which, of course, the major Russian schools do.) Later the company members, still in practice clothes, perform solos from various ballets. The soloists include Alla Mikhalchenko, Andris Liepa, Semenyaka, Vetrov, Ananiashvili, Yuri Vasyuchenko, Maximova, and Vasiliev, who even this late in his career was amazingly energetic and charismatic. Nina Timofeyeva, in 1983 much older than most of the soloists, performs admirably with a very clean technique, giving a good idea of the powerful dancer she must have been in her youth. The section closes with a slow-motion film of Messerer (famous for his elevation) in his youth.The editing is irksome, but the excellent performances and especially the Messerer tribute make this video a great buy.