Anna Karenina ballet. Choreographed 2017 by John Neumeier to music of Tchaikovsky, Alfred Schnittke, and Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam. Inspired by the Tolstoy novel but set in modern times. Recorded 2022 at the Hamburg State Opera. Stars Anna Laudere (Anna Karenina); Edvin Revazov (Alexie Vronski); Ivan Urban (Alexie Karenin); Aleix Martínez (Levin); Emilie Mazoń (Kitty); Marià Huguet (Seryozha); Karen Azatyan (A Muzhik); Patricia Friza (Dolly); and Florian Pohl (Stiva). Nathan Brock conducts the Hamburg State Philharmonic Orchestra. Staging, sets, costumes, and lighting by John Neumeier; Anna Karenina dressed by Akris-Albert Kriemler; video and graphic designs by Kiran West; assistant set designer was Heinrich Tröger. Directed for TV by Myriam Hoyer. Especially good bonus feature. Ballet runs 225 minutes and Bonus runs 67 minutes. Released 2023, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: A+.
Forget about longing to see long ballet clips showing the whole stage and whole bodies of the dancers. Here Neumeier and film director Myriam Hoyer make a motion picture to be shown first on TV. But this show has much that will please those who know Tolstoy’s novel or do their homework. If you get this under control, you can take reading Anna off your bucket list and move on to something like Brothers Karamazov.
Anna Karenina (Anna Laudere) is trophy wife to successful polititian Alexie Karenin (Ivan Urban). Urban reminds one of Vladimir Putin!
Anna has everything except she is starved for love:
Anna’s brother is Stiva (Florian Pohl ). He is loose with love to the ire of his faithful wife Dolly ( Patricia Friza). Why is Dolly so upset this time?
Well Dolly and Stiva have 5 children together. But that doesn’t keep Stiva from seducing the childrens’ governess!
Dolly has a sister Kitty, who is also a good girl like Dolly. Kitty has just become engaged to the famous lacrosse captain Vronski (Edvin Revazov):
But Vronski has also just become interested in Anna! And soon he and Anna are playing with fire!
Oops! Anna is pregnant by Vronski:
When Vronski is injured in a lacrosse match, it becomes evident that Anna is now in love with him. Anna has the same weakness as her brother Stiva:
Now it’s time to meet a good guy. He is Levin (Aleix Martínez). Levin is an aristocrate like all the other characters we have met so far. But Levin spurns the evils of city life. He prefers to live in the country where he leads his serfs to good harvests. (Levin is considered by critics to be the voice of Tolstoy speaking in the novel.) Levin has always been in love with Kitty. So he was frustrated when Kitty got engaged to Vronski. He was even more frustrated when Kitty had a mental breakdown caused by being dumped by Vronski. Levin never gives up on Kitty, and he helps restore her health.
Meawhile Stiva continues to frustrate Dolly by philandering with ballerinas at the Bolshoi Ballet:
Dolly wants to abandon her family out of horror at Stiva’s behavior. But the children convince her to stay:
Anna tries to work out some sort of arrangement with her husband and her lover:
Levin and Kitty get hitched:
Anna and Vronski run away to Italy. Anna abandons her son (she had with Karenin) to Karenin. She also abandons her new baby (fathered by Vronski) to Karenin. The new baby is a daughter, who is also named Anna! So Anna Karenina is the baddest girl in Russian literature (maybe in all literature). Tolstoy apparently wanted to make her as wicked as Puskin’s Tatyana, the ideal Russian woman, was good:
Italy is warmer than Russia, but soon Anna is just as bored there as she was in Moscow:
A mysterious muzhik or Russian peasant (Karen Azatyan) pops up from time to time to baffle the protagonists. He stands for, of course, for the Russian problem: how to make a just and successful country out of the largest and coldest forest on earth. Not all that much progress has been made in that regard since Tolstoy wrote about Anna:
After years of idleness in warmer climes, Anna returns home. She tries to get back into society by attending a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the opera. She is shunned, but Vronski has a new girl friend:
Tolstoy was interested in trains, the only economical way back then to get around in Russia. So Anna ends her misery by jumping in front of one. The toy train below looks better in this movie than it did on the big stage in Hamburg:
Because this video was aimed at the TV market, Hoyer includes a lot of close-ups. Here are a few more examples of this:
Neumeier is the leading choreographer and ballet producer in the world now (2023). It’s amazing how he has done this working in the relatively small city of Hamburg (compared to Moscow, London, and Paris). He is charming in the bonus Masterclass with John Neumeier in which he discusses his concept of Anna Karenina. Finally, thanks to C Major for an informative keepcase booklet included with the Blu-ray disc. Grade: A+. But this top grade applies only to those who know the Anna Karenina novel well or who will do the homework necessary to get this sprawling video under control. If you are just looking for another pretty ballet to watch, you might be more baffled than pleased by this title.
It’s easy to get confused about what you are seeing on the Internet about Neumeier’s Anna Karenina. The official video below is from the Hoyer file. Be sure to set this trailer for 1080 on your display:
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