[Review] Étoiles of Paris Opera Ballet & Friends in the English countryside, come rain or shine

Photos from the dress rehearsal by Zachary Culpin

Nothing sums up the indomitable optimism of the English more than our predilection for organising outdoor events in the Summer!  It's a risky endeavour that requires significant mitigation and The Covent Garden Dance Company – under the inspired and energetic leadership of Matt Brady – has learned over many years of its summer spectacular at Hatch House to make every allowance for the dreaded rainfall. This year's event went full-on Glyndebourne with the added extra of a boxed picnic for the sold-out audience.

For the second year running, I attended this outdoor performance in the bucolic setting of the House's 17th Century walled Dutch garden, overlooking the beautiful countryside of the Vale of Wardour; and, for the second successive year, the Heavens' opened and it lashed down with rain. But the capacity audience was adequately sheltered under a huge canopy and the only evidence of rainfall was water streaming harmlessly from the edges and my precautionary waterproof coat was, mercifully, redundant. Not all the audience remained quite so dry since a portly wood pigeon flew onto a decorative concrete ball on the garden wall behind the stage and remained in situ, watching the performance intently until the light faded. Perhaps it was a balletomane in a former life!

Great credit is due to Brady for attracting some rare talents from the Paris Opera Ballet to perform in the depths of the English countryside. Despite being the UK's nearest neighbours, the stars of Parisian ballet are infrequent visitors to perform in Britain and it is a real coup for Brady to have brought them to the Wiltshire countryside rather than the Royal Opera House or London Coliseum. Credit also for a satisfyingly diverse and full programme that mixed excerpts from the classics with neoclassical, modern and new repertoire. Brady adds back regular new work each year through an associated charity, the Dicky Buckle Fund, named after the well-known dance critic, Richard Buckle, a local Wiltshire man who died in Salisbury – the nearest city to Hatch House – in 2001.

This year's recipient of the choreographic award was former Royal Ballet principal, Mara Galeazzi, a long-term supporter of the Hatch House programme who made a free-flowing organic and intensely romantic duet entitled Toujours, which she danced with Jason Kittelberger. Now approaching her 50^th birthday (in November) Galeazzi remains on scintillating form and naturally her own choreography showcased her considerable strengths of hyper-flexibility, expressionism, and lyrical musicality. Kittelberger is a redoubtable partner and Toujours is replete with natural, unforced lifts, notable for the softness in the way Kittelberger transported his partner without any obvious force or grip. The duet was rooted in a romantic score by Galeazzi's friend, Domenico Clapasson. I sat on a table with nine people, many of whom were attending a ballet performance for the first time, and their view, which seemed representative of the audience as a whole judging by its enthusiastic reception, was that this was the evening's highlight.    

Topping the bill was Myriam Ould-Braham who – even after a brief walk through the rain to reach the stage – danced an ice-cool, unhurried White Swan pas de deux, ably supported by Mickaël Lafon, a POB Coryphée. No matter how many times one has seen the White Swan adage (and I had seen it again only on the previous evening as part of the programme celebrating Carlos Acosta's 50th birthday) I suggest that it will not have been performed as meaningfully as here: perhaps the outdoor setting and the rain gave Ould-Braham's Swan Queen that added touch of authenticity!

Ould-Braham returned for the next performance (separated by the second interval) showing another side to her artistry, performing (again with Lafon) Nuits S'Achéve (The Night's End), by former POB director, Benjamin Millepied to music oddly credited to Daniel Barenboim. Millepied's ballet – a sextet – was premiered in New York on the day after his decision to leave the company was announced, in 2016. The music is actually Beethoven's “Apassionata” Piano Sonata (No. 23 in F minor): perhaps Barenboim had something to do with its arrangement? The ensemble choreography gives way to the fluid pas de deux, performed here by Ould-Braham and Lafon, that is both gentle and explosive, perhaps symbolising the tumult of an intense relationship.

The show had opened with a work by the current POB director, José Martinez, in his Delibes Suite pas de deux, a dance of subtle classicism danced with vitality by Luna Peigné and Pablo Legasa. He joined POB in 2013 and was promoted to premier danseur in 2019, the same year in which Peigné entered the corps de ballet but on the strength of this performance I suspect that her rise through the ranks is imminent.

Another pair of POB étoiles, Valentine Colasante and Guillaume Diop, performed a rousing interpretation of Rudolf Nureyev's Don Quixote grand pas de deux. Nureyev was, of course, also director of the POB and his choreography was understandably well represented in this gala. The role of Kitri is special to Colasante since she was made an étoile in January 2018 following a performance of Nureyev's Don Quixote. This significance shone through her effervescent performance at Hatch House, ably supported by Diop's ebullient virtuosity.   

Another star of the show was Ksenia Ovsyanick, now a principal of Staatsballett Berlin but so well-remembered as a dancer at English National Ballet (from 2008-2016) who was never accorded the status in England that she deserved. Ovsyanick danced an elegant Fanny Elssler pas de deux (in the choreography of Pierre Lacotte) partnered by long-standing Berlin principal and gala favourite, Dinu Tămăzlăcaru. Ovsyanick and Tămăzlăcaru each returned for a party piece humorous solo: dressed in a tight white leotard, Ovsyanick performed Maurice Béjart's comical La Porte, moving her body in time with the creaking door sounds that open Pierre Henry's score. This audience favourite was later followed by another when Tămăzlăcaru performed the gala perennial that is Ben Van Cauwenbergh's drunken Les Bourgeois solo (albeit without the usual setting of barroom tables and drinks).

The Royal Ballet is always represented at Hatch House and, this year, that lead honour went to Francesca Hayward, supported by Marco Masciari (this recently promoted First Artist ably stepping in and stepping up for an indisposed Cesar Corrales).  They were outstanding in the glorious, sentimental duet from Christopher Wheeldon's Within The Golden Hour, returning with similar striking effect in Wayne McGregor's Morgen, his fluid and lyrical duet made on Hayward and Corrales during the pandemic.   

Peigné and Diop returned for the balcony pas de deux from Rudolf Nureyev's Romeo and Juliet, which suffered marginally by the constrained setting, a lack of context and the recorded music. Clearly live music is cost and capacity prohibitive in such a setting, but the gala suffered due to recorded music being cut quickly and sometimes prematurely, and in this case being started again at the end of the piece, much to the dancers' bemusement. They may have suspected an encore was required and, indeed, the final performance (Colasante and Legasa dancing Sébastian Bertaud's Renaissance) left the enthusiastic audience on their feet for a standing ovation and calling for an encore. Sadly, it was only the rain that obliged but the satisfied spectators were able to decant for a few more happy hours to another tented venue decked out with a live band as a 1920s Speak-easy. The entertainment and the liquor flowed on until the early hours: Brady and his colleagues certainly know how to keep their customers engaged and happy, come rain or shine!   

Graham Watts

Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA).  He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge's Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.

He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics' Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv.  He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.