Soviet Union

Giselle, was the greatest masterpiece among the ballets staged in Paris during the heyday of Romanticism. The double challenge of its central role - the simple peasant girl driven from joy to madness and death through an unhappy love, who becomes a ghost ordered to help destroy the man who betrayed her, and yet seeks to sustain him because of her undying love - has been called the Hamlet of ballet, and the interpreters of Giselle have included many of the greatest ballerinas since the ballet was first seen in 1841. It was in Russia that the importance of Giselle was recognised, and the ballet preserved, when it had disappeared from every other European theatre and the Leningrad State Kirov Ballet is the direct descendant of the Tsar's St. Petersburg ballet who guarded its great traditions since 1842; the year after its Paris premiere. The Kirov production we see here offers a choreographic text and dramatic understanding that are a direct product of this illustrious historical lineage: Giselle is superbly alive in this unrivalled presentation.