Performances begin February 23.
The Bolshoi Ballet will present the Shostakovich ballet The Bright Stream, February 23- 25.
The premiere of The Bright Stream took place in Leningrad Minor Opera and Ballet Theatre on April 4, 1935. Both audience and critics accepted the ballet eagerly so it was decided to be staged on the country's main stage.
On November 30, same year, The Bright Stream was presented at the Bolshoi, adding to the leading soloists' repertoire. The cast for the main parts included Asaf and Sulamith Messerer, Sofia Golovkina, Aleksei Yermolaev, Zinaida Vasilieva and Pyotr Gusev - one of the future artistic directors of the Bolshoi Ballet... Audience enjoyed the merry performance, and its choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov looked forward to become the artistic director of the Bolshoi ballet company. All the more unexpected was the denouement which destroyed The Bright Stream. Stalin had forbidden it. A smasher appeared in the country's main communist party newspaper Pravda on February 6, 1936. They thought the comedy with traditional nice balletic extravagance to be a parody on happy Soviet life like it was customary to picture it then.Videos