Continuing his quest to bring the repertoire of the Ballets Russes back to today’s stage, Andris Liepa, former Bolshoi Ballet star turned ballet entrepreneur, director and producer returns to the London Coliseum in July with a programme (performed by the orchestra, chorus, ballet and soloists from the Natalia Sats Moscow State Opera and Ballet Theatre conducted by Alevtina Ioffe) that will include Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or or The Golden Cockerel.
Based on Pushkin’s fairy tale, The Golden Cockerel will be a re-imagining of this opera-ballet (there’s little record of the original choreography by Mikhail Fokine), co-directed and staged by Liepa and Gregoriy Isaakyan, Artistic Director of the Moscow State Opera, and choreographed by Gali Abaidulov.
Andris Liepa said, “It’s been a very long-standing dream of mine to reconstruct The Golden Cockerel.
"It was Mikhail Fokine’s last work which he made for Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons and it stunned his contemporaries, not only with its unusual combination of the opera and ballet genres, but also with an absolutely amazing set design by Natalia Goncharova.
"It is such a miracle to see how her fairy sketches come alive onstage! When I was a child I often viewed those sketches in my father’s, Maris Liepa, archive and dreamt of getting into this magical world.
"The Golden Cockerel is one of the works in which my childhood dreams are coming true. My father gave us, his children, a real fairy tale and we are looking forward to sharing it with the Coliseum audience.”