Music came to find me in rural South Dakota, surely explaining why I'm alive today. Because it found me first in church, where my mother �" who, at the piano at home, had a torrid bluesy streak �" was the organist, my first musical mind-blower was "the" (as we said then) Messiah by was-he-or-wasn't-he Handel. My first record purchase, in the nearby Big City (of 40,000), was Eugene Ormandy's cut version, on two LPs, tailor-made for my allowance. That led to a membership in the Columbia Record Club, where Ormandy ruled, but also where an upstart named Leonard Bernstein began a cycle of Mahler symphonies in hope of resuscitating the composer's poor reputation. I began with Lennie's Third, which just slammed me.
Soon, along came Ormandy's Swan Lake "Suite," cut to fit a single LP, and that sinewy, beckoning, tragedy-drenched melody �" the promise of a Swan Lake beyond "bloodsucker"-infested Marion Lake �" found my inner queen and locked her tragic-romantic heart in its veiny embrace. It may not have been until Ken Russell's The Music Makers, years later, that I discovered that Tchaikovsky was gay, and tragically, but I had known in our special communication from the start.
Some other big tunes from those days eventually outstayed their welcome, or my puberty, but that primal, insinuating Swan Lake Theme has never once failed me as transport from here to there, my favorite itinerary. I've been as moved by it as lobby music in the Bangkok hotel where my health club is as I've been more literally moved by it at Babylon Sauna, where the music at the end of Act II is apposite and in a contagious kind of way.
I wasn't exactly vouchsafed a rich Swan Lake life, but then my first summer away from home, in St. Louis, I was able to take my visiting family to an outdoor festival performance of the complete ballet, with live orchestra, and Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in the leads. Had fam paid closer attention to my response, a certain revelation a decade later might not have been such a surprise.
Being a music critic has been a buffer from overexposure to Swan Lake, if there is such a thing, allowing me to wade back in at my own discretion. My latest dip has been into the newly released DVD of the Covent Garden Lake in what's promised as its last video release (Opus Arte) in the long-running, drapery-weighted Anthony Dowell production. I sought it for the same reason the Royal Ballet and Opus Arte did, to preserve Natalia Osipova's exultant, charged Odette-Odile. I've learned that Osipova has her detractors; we'll call them bitches. Surely they don't dispute that hers is as advanced a technique as any we've seen, and poetic in essence. In every step she takes, every move she makes, and every breath she takes (apologies to Sting and Police) there's a degree of extension, yielding freedom and exaltation in movement itself, allowed very few mortals, and usually no more than one to an age. Many a swan dancer has done that wavy thing with the arms, but when Osipova does it, you could rightly wonder if there are bones in hers. It's not the illusion of fluidity; it's fluidity. As with singers, there are dancers who make it look hard and dancers who make it look easy, and Osipova is in that charmed second class. You never worry for her, so fall deeply into her dancing, and she rewards you with the otherworldly. It doesn't ooze emotion, it embodies it, and no other Swan Queen in my experience has emerged so rich and complex a creature.
I've not seen the array of competing videos of this august production, so I didn't mind sitting through it, though I found the miming �" its claim to a certain kind of historical authenticity �" a dull affair, and the endless swags of heavy drapery get oppressive. Boris Gruzin leads the diligent ROH Orchestra in one of those squarish readings that we're told dancers need.
It sent me back to the Mariinski Ballet, with its rightful claims to being the "original" Swan Lake , Petipa's choreography still hanging on for dear life. The Decca CD set of the complete ballet left me cold, thinking conductor Valery Gergiev also too limited by the constraints of dance music. But going back to the Decca DVD after the Royal Ballet's, I was swept up in Gergiev's penetrating way with the piece, and the great yields of what might be seen as his autocratic way of "making the dancers work," particularly with some challengingly slow tempos. But their dancing is the more artistic for it, notably that of Ilya Kuznetsov's fully danced evil Rothbart, leagues beyond his upholstered, miming counterpart in London.
For a complete CD set, there's none better than the 1991 MTT with the London Symphony, which takes the music completely seriously and exalts it.
But it all sent me back to Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake for Adventures in Motion Pictures (Warner), which exists in a number of versions, and you want only the 1996 one, with Adam Cooper as the Swan. I was lucky to see it live in Los Angeles, and it's as life-changing a theatrical experience as I've had. The swans, as well as the Prince (Scott Ambler in a devastating enactment of obsession), are men, but this is light years away from a Trockadero spoof. Bourne's treatment �" brilliantly funny in the overstuffed first act �" is as unblinking a look at mother incest as anything between Sons and Lovers and Spanking the Monkey. These male swans exude sex, allure, and menace. For that other world, where the assumption is that with sex gay men have it all, and get off easy, this is a corrective view of the emotional stakes, shot through with unspeakable beauty.