26.05.2012

Gala concert featuring A. Yagudin concludes Nuriev Festival in Kazan

(Kazan, May 27, Tatar-inform, Maria Kirukhina). The 25th international classic ballet Nuriev Festival has ended. The concluding part was a grand gala on Sunday night, traditionally held at the Tatar Opera and Ballet Theatre.

The performance commenced with an adagio from The Nutcracker, presented by the theatre’s lead dancers. The luxurious setting, actors’s elegant outfits and familiar melodies stirred a lot of emotions in the audience.

The act performed by Bolshoi Theatre premier dancer Mikhail Lobukhin to the song by Vladimir Vysotsky It Is All Wrong astounded with its sincerity and truthfulness. With zero scenery and a black backdrop, the performance exuded emotion and that was enough to produce effect.

The same applied to the dance performed by the figure skating Olympic champion Alexei Yagudin and Bolshoi Theatre’s lead dancer Kristina Kretova. The act performed by Yagudin and Kretova to Zemfira’s Do you want?, performed by the late Ludmila Gurchenko, was a true gift for the audience.

Kristina Kretova had conceded at a news conference before the show she had long been a fan of Zemfira and felt particularly great staging the act based on her music. The audience seemed enraptured by the performance dwelling on a theme of selfless eternal love.

So-called intellectual choreography was presented by Cuban National Ballet lead dancers Valdes Herrera and Osiel Gounod, who performed an act called Puppets.

The gala evening concluded with the culmination of The Nutcracker, in which all the final concert’s participants appeared onstage.