Archangel of the arts?

Many ballet dancers, writes Jennifer Homans, 'are suspicious of words, and understandably so: they spend their lives working with their bodies and with music, and words are simply not their trade'. All the more impressive, then, that two former dancers write so beautifully about their art. The first lady remains Royal Ballet trained Julie Kavanagh, with her compelling and superbly researched biographies of Ashton and Nureyev. Now Homans, who started out at the School of American Ballet, ticks many of the literary boxes with an ambitious popular history of the art, Apollo's Angels.

She has enlightened me about so many aspects of ballet that I'd barely given a thought: the intellectual rigour with its roots in the classical belief of human perfectability through the body's geometric proportions, the striving to reach the heavens and 'the great Ballet-master' (as the Abbé Mersenne called 'the author of the universe' in 1636). Later the Jesuits taught the 'mute rhetoric' of dance, gesture and declamation. But it was at the court of Louis XIV, of course, that ballet reached its first, painstakingly stratified plateau. Like his predecessor but with far greater discipline and devotion, the future roi soleil devoted himself to the art and appeared in some 40 ballets. There's no escaping the celebrated image of Louis as Apollo in Le Ballet de la Nuit, with suns great and small all over his costume (I fear this image is back to front, but as it's wikifree, it'll have to do).

Just how lively the court ballets could be we heard on Friday night in an orchestrally and chorally superb performance of Phaëton, Lully's 1684 tragédie lyrique, zestily conducted and played at the harpsichord by that great animateur Christophe Rousset: there's a chaconne to conclude the second act which you feel could go on for ever. Homans tells us how the gravitas of Louis's beloved Courante gave way to the toujours gai Minuet preferred by Lully. Around 1800 we get the waltz, but that's to jump over the Enlightenment development of story-ballets and the French Revolution.

Homans is brilliant, at first anyway, in connecting the art to the times. There's a chapter on the democratisation of dance with the advent of the Revolution. Its later artistic celebrations with women in white as paragons of reason and virtue were a far cry from the scabrous Carmagnole caricatured here in Fred Barnard's Victorian illustration for Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.

There are portraits where Homans goes straight to the anecdotal heart of the matter: of Marie Sallé hitting London in the 1730s, according to one witness 'without hoopskirts , or corps, dishevelled and with no ornaments in her hair...just draped in chiffons on the model of a Greek statue'; and of Marie Taglioni, no beauty, using rigorous self-discipline to steer the dance away from male domination in the 1800s with her embodiment of sylphdom and Gautier's romantic maxim that 'ballets are the dreams of poets taken seriously'. Here's her Sylphide appearing to Scots dreamer James in the French ballet that Bournonville was to immortalise in Denmark with his own special style (it still has a conservative hold, in the best sense, on ballet in that country today).

Diligent in her coverage of how ballet advanced, or not, in other countries through the 19th century, Homans gives us fascinating insight into the proto-Fascist pageants of Luigi Manzotti in Italy: the hugely popular Excelsior (1881), an allegory of Progress, 'boasted a cast of more than five hundred, including twelve horses, two cows and an elephant'.

In Homans's Russian chapters, we are back on the serious tack. The imperial bolstering wasn't news to me, but I hadn't appreciated quite how much Tchaikovsky's later scores 'brought out a whole new range and tone-colour in the human body, a nuance and subtlety that Minkus and Pugni could never inspire'. All this, in The Sleeping Beauty, in spite of the essentially court-dictated spectacle of it all (photo from original 1890 production).

As Homans moves into the 20th Century, she is less ready to take the rough with the smooth, the earthy with the idealistic. On the plus side, there's a pitch-perfect journey through the highs and lows of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with a special pleading for Nijinsky both as dancer, bringing a 'fragrant androgyny' to redefine male dancing 'and put the danseur back at the centre of ballet' (below, in Le Dieu Bleu)

and as choreographer; Le Sacre du Printemps was 'a bleak and intense celebration of the collective will...a coldly rational depiction of a primitive and irrationally charged world...the first truly modern ballet' (Roerich's costume design for the Chosen One below).

Can you believe Le Sacre only had eight performances before being lost to the world? In her epilogue, Homans excoriates Millicent Hodson's 'reconstruction' as 'a travesty' rendering 'a radical and shocking dance...tame and kitschy'. How she could be so sure about the original I don't know, but 'kitschy' was certainly my experience of a recent Maryinsky performance.

Also on the plus side is Homans's delightful potted history of Ashton's progress, growing out of the surprising intellectual beginnings of British ballet proper in the 1920s - Ninette de Valois's Rout, for instance, kicked off with a dancer reciting a poem by German political activist Ernst Toller - and experiencing a miraculous sweet renaissance against the spirit of angrier times with  La Fille mal gardée in 1960. On the minus side is her disapproval of Kenneth MacMillan's later plunge 'into the depths of his own damaged personality and dark obsessions'. Shattering Mayerling, for instance, is dismissed with implied disapproval in a sentence (pictured, Johan Persson's image of Mara Galeazzi with the astounding Edward Watson in a recent Royal Ballet revival) .

The same problem arises with the chapter on Soviet ballet from Stalin to Brezhnev. Homans is excellent on the communist reinvention of the classics, but when she comes to the 1960s, she is more concerned to be down on the 'tasteless and bombastic' aspects of Grigorovitch's Spartacus than to give credit to its colossal energy, still wowing us in the latest personification of Russian masculinity, Ivan Vasiliev (photo by Damir Yusupov for the Bolshoi Ballet, originally included in the Arts Desk review to which I've linked).

Homans rises to the challenge of surveying three great American-based careers: those of the violence-prone Anthony Tudor, of whom I knew little, of Jerome Robbins and above all of the great archangel George Balanchine: such a career that was, from his first great choreography of Stravinsky's music, Apollo, in 1927 - you might see why he changed the look of it in later years -

 to the dying man's 1981 vision of the Adagio lamentoso in Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony.  Detailed reflection on Agon (1957), with Stravinsky's musical time-machine whizzing us from the court dances of Louis XIV through to the dodecaphonic era, returns us full circle to the intellectual beginnings of ballet.

Then the epilogue has to go and spoil it all. Sure, there have been no giants like Balanchine since his death. But nor has ballet itself snuffed it, as Homans implies. What, not a word of today's choreographers, like Ratmansky revitalising the Russian tradition or our British-based live wires, like the pair who have so enchanted my hard-to-please colleague Ismene Brown in her review yesterday of the Ballet Boyz? Homans also has not a word to say about recent hybrids which, it's true, have an eye on the market (why shouldn't they?) but keep their integrity, like the companies of Alvin Ailey (his troupe's phenomenal Samuel Lee Roberts pictured by Paul Kolnik) and Matthew Bourne?

It seems to me that Homans's anxiety to keep her ballet chronicle tied to a cultural history, which is frequently a strength, leads her to see black and white patterns where the truth is somewhere in the middle. Still, hers is a gripping, readable study, which everyone with the slightest interest in ballet should read.

I've been slow to catch up on writing about other reading here. January and February saw a pleasurable return to Iceland. First was Halldór Laxness's typically skewed wit and (I suspect very native) sense of fantasy in The Fish Can Sing, a tale of growing up and falling under the spell of a 'world singer' - or not - in the developing days of Reykjavík's history. Who could fail to be enchanted by this?

It's neither as long nor as sombre as Independent People, which is of course a more epic kind of masterpiece, and infinitely more readable than World Light, which I had to give up on. No readability problems, though, with the thrillers of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Since being engrossed by My Soul to Take - covered in that same blog entry where I referenced Laxness for the first time - after falling under the spell of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, I'd been longing to catch up on her three others to date. I began this time with Ashes to Dust, a magnificent - and educational - mix of the gruesomely personal with the volcanic eruption on Heimaey, the largest of the Westmann Islands, back in 1973 (slightly grainy picture from that time below).

The result of which is, of course, I'm itching to visit the island. Just as evocative in its sense of place is the latest thriller, The Day is Dark, with its baleful evocation of an isolated part of Greenland and its people.  Then I went back to the first of Sigurðardóttir's books, Last Rituals, set mostly in the capital but with a creepy investigation into witchcraft on Iceland.

Indeed, you learn a lot about the country. But the best thing about these books is the disparity between the utterly down to earth, likeable and only mildly dysfunctional protagonist, attorney Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, and the bizarre and often stomach-churning cases with which she's involved. There's plenty of mileage in the character yet, so I look forward to more.

Antic Saturday

That was a crazy one, Saturday 9 February, very much crowned by Mark Rylance's matinée anti-idol of a Richard III (production photos by Simon Annand). The day's trajectory became seriously complicated when Gillian Moore, Head of Classical Music at the Southbank Centre, rang up late the previous afternoon to ask if I could step in for Tom Service, who'd gone down with the norovirus, to give a talk in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer. When? In 19 hours' time, at 12.30pm, for an hour. On what? Paris 1910-1930, the latest subject in The Rest is Noise festival of 20th century music.

Well, that I could do, basing it around what I knew of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes - quite a bit - and Prokofiev's viewpoint on the city as a resident in the 1920s. Gillian wanted me to include a fair amount of music from the concerts that were about to be performed. I replied that at such short notice I'd have to make do with what I'd got on the shelves. Fortunately I did have a copy of Antheil's Ballet Mécanique, and a CD of Josephine Baker, so that covered two essential requirements.

The preparation time, though, was short. I couldn't sacrifice a Friday night reunion with old Edinburgh University pals, two of whom had already arrived to stay from Washington and Cardiff. It turned out to be a wonderful evening, 15 round a big table at the Joy King Lau in Soho, including superstar Kerry Richardson of Bedlam Theatre Cabaret fame (now 'in telly') whom I hadn't seen for over 30 years. And a milestone in one way at least: the first time the six of us who spent a golden year together in 32 Dundas Street had sat down to eat together since 1982.

I got back predictably lateish, didn't sleep much and was up at 7am to start preparation. Half way through, the CD I'd started to burn with the extracts failed. And a second, a third, a fourth. A faulty pack. At 10am I pedalled furiously to Hammersmith, bought a decent set of CD-Rs and rushed back. Got to the Queen Elizabeth Hall at 12.10pm with 20 minutes to spare for a quick soundcheck. The Southbank team couldn't have been more soothing or friendly - and that includes the sound man, who must be the first of his ilk to say how much he'd enjoyed it at the end.

I had fun (and kinda glad Ben Larpent, Southbank Classical Music Programme Manager, documented the occasion, however weird I look with right arm flapping. Maybe I should have gone for Josephine's Banana Dance look). What a great audience - some seated in front of the stage, others eating at tables, including a jolly mother and baby.

Jude Kelly did the same relaxed, thoroughly professional job of introducing and questioning at the end I'd noted at James MacMillan's talk the previous week. I'd been asked to give some substantial excerpts, though obviously my playlist was quite different from the one Gillian had set up in The Guardian. I thought I'd keep a record of it here. To keep it short I won't list the recordings used.

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (1913) - introduction compared with Musorgsky's shepherd-boy pipings at the end of the Sorochintsy Fair interlude we know as the epilogue to Night on the Bare Mountain; the 5/4-6/4 tune for the Spring Rounds compared with the 11/4 finale of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden; Procession of the Sage (polyrhythms) and Kissing the Earth (The Sage). (Image above: one of Roerich's designs for the original production).

Ravel: Ma mère l'oye - Beauty and the Beast, in the orchestral arrangement of 1910/12

Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole - Habanera, starting with four-hand piano version of 1895 and morphing into the orchestral arrangement of 1908

Stravinsky: Etude pour pianola (1917)

Antheil: Ballet Mécanique (1922-30 - opening (four-pianola version; see end of blog entry for later performance with film)

Satie: Parade (1917) - sequence with typewriter, pistol-shots and siren (photo: Picasso's designs for the American and French managers)

Milhaud: La création du monde (1923) - jazz fugue

Josephine Baker - 'J'ai deux amours' (1930)

Prokofiev: The Prodigal Son (1928-9) - final theme

A question or two, and then I had 20 minutes to whizz over the Thames to the matinée of Richard III. I've already begun to treat of this (in superlatives) in an earlier blog entry under that very funny photo of Rylance's king bearing a 'No Parking' traffic sign. I wish I'd caught the latest of his celebrated post-run speeches, but even at the penultimate show he managed to praise the first of the double-cast princes who were taking their leave and to say, with his usual tear-jerking sincerity, what a joy it had been for all of the actors to see so many kids in the audience.

There must have been more, of course, in the initial Globe run. I'd heard that MR took time to warm to his chameleonic impersonation after a family bereavement, but by the end of this Apollo Theatre transfer he was absolutely in his element from the very first speech. The voice has a greater range now - he can be bass-baritonal as well as his usual tenorial self. He had the extraordinary way of fixing on the stalls and on us in the upper circle so that you got the feeling he was looking directly at you. The laughing, and laughter-making, player of the first half became the deadly psychopath of the second, though, so that the roaring audience fell very silent.

The other joy of Tim Carroll's production, every inch as good as his Twelfth Night which I didn't dare see this time after fond memories of four Globe performances, was the teamwork. Maybe Johnny Flynn as Lady Anne was vocally a little weak, but the other 'ladies' couldn't have been better. James Garnon, whose star quality first shone at the Globe in Carroll's otherwise disappointing Dido, Queen of Carthage and flamed as James I in Brenton's Anne Boleyn, metamorphosed from a dignified Duchess of York into a plausible, noble successor to the throne at the end. Finest of all was Sam Barnett's Queen Elizabeth.

With Barnett and Rylance, the spat between bereaved mother and child-murderer was hair-raising: I'd never thought of it as one of the great scenes in Shakespeare, but I do now. The battle stuff that followed can drag; never for a moment here, with the rivals in their tents deftly intercut and the ghosts of the slain gathering round Richmond to despatch York.

 I came out wishing that after all I could stay on and see the same company + S Fry (not a draw for me personally after earlier, marvellous Malvolios) in the Twelfth Night production I knew and loved so well. But Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky beckoned over at the Barbican, with live accompaniment from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under a meticulously synchronising Martyn Brabbins pretext for The Arts Desk review. I've seen this version three times live now, and the film many more, and I seem to have got past the stage of scoffing at the propagandist black-and-white of Nevsky as compared to the more nuanced Ivan the Terrible.

On this occasion I simply admired the actors' superb handling of their types. Nikolay Cherkassov's prince is so handsome and stirring, of course, but it was marvellous to hear the audience laughing so readily at Nikolay Okhlopkov's buffoon. A rich ending to a teeming Saturday; and on Sunday I was rescued from having to review Novello's Gay's the Word when I arrived at Barons' Court to find the District Line inoperative and the Piccadilly Line recently  closed by a 'person under a train' - and that in itself was understandable on a cold, deluging February afternoon.

Grand finale - only connect: Eisenstein thought Fernand Léger's 1924 film to accompany Antheil's Ballet Mécanique was 'one of the true masterpieces of cinema'. I'm not sure how well it synchs with the music, which only joined it in the 1990s (and in the later version where the pianos are all but drowned out by the percussion and 'special effects'). But it's quite something to have both together.

Chopin list

On the stage of Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet in June 1909 were Vaslav Nijinsky in a rather unbecoming orangey-blond wig and attendant ethereal creatures including Tamara Karsavina and Alicia Pavlova. Down in the pit the orchestra played the joint creative input of six musical minds, colliding in a pretty mélange of sorts. Since three of them – Chopin, Stravinsky and Glazunov – are to meet in the Royal Ballet’s triple bill of A Month in the Country, A Birthday Offering and Les noces next month, and I needed to knit them together somehow in a programme article, the premiere of Les sylphides seemed like a very good place to start.

Digging out the whys and wherefores made me realize what a complex musical history this more or less plotless ballet, with its romantic poet flanked by long-tutued sylphs, has had. Not only does it tend to be most often performed, when it is performed at all, in Roy Douglas’s arrangement, but since the Russians other orchestrators have included Maurice Ravel in 1914* and Benjamin Britten, in a 1940 effort for an American ballet company sadly lost (and the editors of Britten’s letters must be believed on this, rather than Richard Taruskin, who claims the orchestration to be ‘in current use’. I wish it were).

So I thought as a kind of fridge-magnet memo to self I would attempt as un-drily as I could to list the path to the 1909 Les sylphides. Volume One of Taruskin’s Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions was a huge help, with detail from Lynn Garafola’s Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

Glazunov kicked off in 1892 with his orchestral suite Chopiniana, presumably inspired by what Tchaikovsky had done with Mozart piano pieces + the motet ‘Ave verum corpus’ Lisztified in his Suite No. 4. The four pieces in Chopiniana – none of them, note, used in Les sylphides – were the 'Military' Polonaise, Op. 40 No. 1; the Nocturne in F, Op. 15 No. 1; the Mazurka in C sharp minor, Op. 50 No. 3;  and the Tarantelle, Op. 43.

In 1907 Mikhail Fokine – pictured above two years earlier in costume for Paquita – choreographed Chopiniana for the Mariinsky. He asked Glazunov to make an additional orchestration of the C sharp minor Waltz, Op. 64 No. 2 with a bit of the Op. 25 No. 7 Etude to preface it. The waltz did of course survive into the Diaghilev-managed Les sylphides.

Chopiniana the ballet showcased national as well as classical dances – Warsaw ballroom style for the Polonaise, Capri-based folk dance for the Tarantella. That had little in common with Les sylphides. But the music and choreography for Fokine’s second Chopiniana ballet, entitled Grand Pas to Music by Chopin, certainly did. This retained only the C sharp minor Waltz and placed it alongside the six other numbers we know from Les sylphides (I'm getting opus fatigue now, and I'm sure you are, so we'll leave it at that until Stravinsky's contribution pops up).

 When Diaghilev turned to ‘the second Chopiniana’ for his Ballets Russes’ first appearance in the Parisian ‘Saison Russe’ of 1909, he clearly didn’t think much of its arrangements other than Glazunov’s; the rest had been hastily done by a répétiteur at the Mariinsky, Maurice Keller. So Diaghilev turned to Lyadov, Taneyev, Nikolay Tcherepnin and...the 26 year old Igor Stravinsky, who at the beginning of 1909 impressed him with his orchestral showpiece the Scherzo fantastique. I’ve not been able to trace the other arrangements, but Stravinsky’s not especially flavoursome yet historically fascinating versions of the Nocturne in A flat, Op. 32. No. 2 and the Grande Valse brillante, Op. 28 appear in rather poor sound – and with visuals you fortunately don't need to watch – via a performance from Sakari Oramo and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Don't ask me why there's a snippet of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto at the start, but don't readjust your sets - it quickly vanishes.

Which provides an excuse very belatedly to congratulate Oramo on his appointment as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, taking up the baton in September. That fabulous Bax/Saariaho/Sibelius concert which was definitely one of the highs of 2011 clearly had its impact - and looking back at the associated blog post, I see there was speculation in the comments about who would take over the reins at the BBCSO. One thing I didn't know at the time was that it was the first occasion on which Oramo had conducted a London orchestra.

And while sounding the BBC note, fullish details of the works at the 2012 Proms (though minus artists) are here on the Arts Desk and here on the BBC Proms website, less easy to take in at once. All I’ll say is that there must be something there to satisfy everyone, and that if another Beethoven symphonies cycle would usually send me diving for cover, the fact that it comes from Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a real coup for the world's biggest music festival.

*this added in the light of Shin-ichi Numabe's comment below.

Perfumed genius

After our all too brief visit to the V&A's glorious Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes exhibition, the diplo-mate decided that he wanted the same perfume as that favoured by the dandy-impresario in the 1920s*. Today seemed like a good one to honour him with the results of my search - especially as a Christmas present had been wanting (you'll have to believe me when I say we are not, I think, a very materialistic couple).

Yes, the magic name of Guerlain, established in the early 19th century, is still producing Mitsouko, first unleashed in 1919. I read that 'the creation of Mitsouko was inspired by the heroine of Claude Farrere's novel La bataille, a story of an impossible love between Mitsouko, the wife of Japanese Admiral Togo, and a British officer' in 1905. The novel has died a death, but the scent which Diaghilev used to perfume not just himself but also the curtains wherever he was staying, lives very strongly on. I agree with Nicholas Blincoe in his New Statesman article, when he asks 'in what other field is it possible to use the exact same product as Queen Victoria (Fleurs de Bulgarie), Colette (Jicky), Diaghilev (Mitsouko), Marilyn Monroe (Chanel No 5) or me (Neroli Sauvage)? And with these perfumes, you are not buying a reproduction or an approximation. It really is the same perfume.'


So, with a new-found excitement over the world of living smells, I finally tracked down le tout Guerlain at a counter in Harvey Nicks'. In what's only my second visit - the first was last summer, when we took a giggling mother and daughter Lambton to try on identical dresses - I put my request to the shop girl. She'd never heard of Diaghilev, but she did point out that Mitsuoko was beloved of 'lots of celebrities' and had a very feminine fragrance (I had to put her right that it wasn't necessarily feminine I was after).


While I was waiting for the elaborate gift-wrap ritual, I had a good test of other Guerlain flower-potpourri fragrances. Mitsouko seemed to be the strongest, Champs-Elysees dated back to 1889, Nahema was my favourite (though J found the taster card too 'violety'). Imagine my excitement, though, when I got home to do some research and tracked down a passage I was looking for in the Prokofiev diaries. Yes, he was attracted to perfumes too, and to Guerlain, no less. For once, the brilliant Anthony Phillips needs a different letter in his transcription - the perfume in question is Kadine rather than Cadine. It came out in 1911 and was resuscitated in 2005, though bottles seem to be bandied around the net at c.$500 each (dearly as I love my main master, I'm not going there).


Here are some of the historic entries:

(4 March 1913) Tonechka Popova [fellow student at the Petersburg Conservatoire] has the most wonderful perfume. I fell in love with it before Christmas, but it got all used up before I could find out the make. Today both Popova and her perfume suddenly reappeared out of the blue, and I relieved her of her handkerchief. Mama thinks the perfume smells like the fresh melted water you sometimes get in the middle of a patch of ice, but I must find out the name of it tomorrow and buy myself some. There are times when I am very much drawn to a strongly aromatic scent. I remember the first time I was in Sukhum I could not get over the smell of the gardenias.
On 5 March Prokofiev is misled into thinking it's 'Guerlain Coty', but discovers this is a nonsense, so rings up Popova and persists. She tells him what he wants is 'Guerlain Kadine'. After doing the rounds of chemists and parfumiers, 'when at last I telephoned a big store on Nevsky [Prospect] they did have it, I was thrilled. It's not cheap: 10 roubles for a small bottle' (Mitsouko's not cheap either).


6 March: after composing part of the third movement of the Second Piano Concerto, 'I bought a bottle of Guerlain Kadine and am luxuriating in this scent, despite nagging doubts that it may not be the same as Popova's'.

I wonder if the two Sergeys ever discussed perfumes. I like to think so. At any rate it's a delicious link between the two - and me, and the diplo-mate.

*'30s' was a typo. I know all too well when Diaghilev died - shortly after the opening of The Prodigal Son in 1929, and in Venice, where else?

Every costume tells a story

And in the Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes exhibition opening on Saturday at the Victoria and Albert Museum, it's not just the familiar story of The Rite of Spring's notorious opening night (Roerich's designs pictured above, with extra dummy). We had the rare pleasure of a preview tour around the show by the V&A's Director of Theatre and Performance, and co-curator of this exhibition, Geoffrey Marsh. So affable, enthusiastic and un-self-important was he that he pulled us up short when he told us how he'd canvassed for this or that costume, attempted to buy some vital sketches at auction or gone to extreme lengths to get an old Russian recording of a folk singer much admired by Stravinsky.

Diaghilev retrospectives have never been thin on the ground, though the last big one at the Barbican turns out to have been 14 years ago (it was at a talk there that I met our now dear old friend Ross Alley). But I was more thrilled by this one than by any of the others. Already, as we entered through the back route, I caught a glimpse of the vast forecloth for Le train bleu, Picasso's celebrated image of the two big-armed and -breasted woman running down the beach. You can see them behind his costume design for the Chinese acrobat in the epoch-making Parade.


That canvas is huge, of course, as is Natalia Gon(t)charova's backdrop panoply of onion domes for the 1926 revival of the pioneering Firebird. Both are owned by the V&A and simply can't be displayed other than in exceptional circumstances like this: if anyone has the right space for the Gon(t)charova, Geoffrey would appreciate a call.


It's discreetly lit in a giant space flanked by clever films of a silhouetted firebird spinning to the infernal dance.


Incidentally, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the BBC website still has up and running the film of last year's pre-Prom Stravinsky discussion chaired by Chris Cook in which I get to exchange ideas with the admirable Stephanie Jordan.

Anyway, the visual aspect of the show is done with all the panache you'd expect from the revitalised V&A (and a bit more than the not-quite-as-bad-as-usual Proms backdrop above). And what costumes they have, either original or lovingly remade. Standing out in room one is a Bakst cossack from Thamar in 1912, complete with pockets full of cartridges. Geoffrey told us they'd heard from a lady in Wales whose mother had been a Georgian princess of the same name as the ballet's bloodthirsty heroine, and in the days of the great Ballets Russes costume sales, her husband had bought her a clutch of costumes. Most had been eaten by moths tucked away in an attic, but this one survived and has been spectacularly cleaned (no image here as yet; you'll have to see it for yourselves).

Some tough decisions had to be taken. Nijinsky's costume as the Spectre of the Rose wouldn't do, because most of the roses had been removed and the tights would prosaically remind us what thick legs he had (rather like Nureyev). See for yourself in this photograph from 1911. Sadly it doesn't catch the famous leap through the window, so poetically described in Tony Tanner's one-man Diaghilev show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.


A fun story attaches itself to Cocteau's caricatures of the impresario dressed up as the lady in that ballet and a prancing Nijinsky as the object of his/her admiration. They'd been put up for auction at a ridiculously low £800, Geoffrey went along with the cash - but the first bid, from choreographer John Neumeier, came in at five figures, so that was that. Neumeier has, however, loaned to the exhibition, as have all sorts of collectors and Russian plutocrats.

There are the expected Bakst designs, Diaghilev memorabilia, models and useful little films, all punctuating the rooms in a noisy melee which will presumably sound less distracting once the space fills with crowds. The costume displays are the thing, though, and very tellingly placed. Apart from the Sacre room with its billowing green clouds and films of alternative choreographies, I especially liked the juxtaposition of Bakst's return to the 18th century in his costumes for the 1921 revival of The Sleeping Beauty with flower-power Larionov's designs for Chout, that Prokofiev masterpiece about the buffoon who outwitted seven other buffoons. Last June, I put up a few of Millicent Hodson's and Kenneth Archer's design-reconstructions, so it was very exciting indeed to see them realised in the shape of the fantastical attire for the buffoon and his wife here:



And what about Matisse's vision for Le chant du rossignol in 1920? Again, a costume ahead of its time.


I'll certainly be returning to examine at leisure. But yesterday morning, I spent some time in the V&A's theatre and performance rooms, a zone I'd never visited since the demise of the Covent Garden Theatre Museum. There was a splendid little exhibition of even more futuristic work by Edward Gordon Craig who created many of his strongest theatre designs in Moscow. And in the free selection of designs here, who could resist Dame Edna's Sydney Opera House hat for Ascot?


The London Design Festival is also pervading the already giddying spaces of the V&A this week. Nothing quite as comprehensively wonderful as last year's diplo-mate-encouraged In Praise of Shadows, and I didn't come across many of the buried objects, but on Sunday we did admire Michael Anastassiades's pendulum light amid the rococo of the Norfolk House Music Room.


And there's Oskar Zieta's Blow and Roll in the Madejski Garden.




I'd say I'm only touching the tip of the V&A iceberg. It's at least half a dozen major museums rolled into one. What a lifetime's resource to have on the doorstep.