Everything for love! The National Ballet dances Leo Tolstoy’s bitter love story, choreographed by Christian Spuck.
The price of passion
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
This is how Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina begins, a novel often referred to as the world’s best.
Anna Karenina meets Vronsky on a train journey between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Soon, she sees no way back to her husband and family life but must make the fateful choice between her family – and her son – and the all-consuming love. At the same time, it crackles in the dresses and gossip flows in the high society parties she is a part of.
Best premiere of the year
“Anna Karenina is not just a novel about families, but about an entire society, with traces of the Russian revolution, even communism. It is a masterpiece.” That’s what Christian Spuck, the German choreographer who created a character-driven classical ballet of Anna Karenina in 2014, says.
Ballet Zurich and the National Ballet collaborated to produce the performance, and the magazine Dance Europe named the ballet the best premiere of the year in 2014. After its world premiere in Zurich and performances in Oslo in 2016 and 2019, the ballet has been danced in many other places around the world.
Great music
Christian Spuck has chosen to set the ballet to music by composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and Witold Lutosławski. The music is played by piano soloist Håvard Gimse and the Opera Orchestra. Additionally, mezzo-soprano Cecilia Yufan Zhang – one of the singers in WOYS (The Wilhelmsen Opera Studio for Young Singers) – interprets a selection of Rachmaninoff’s Russian folk songs.
