La Bayadère ("The Temple Dancer") ballet. Music by Ludwig Minkus orchestrated and arranged by John Lanchbery. Choreography by Natalia Makarova after Marius Petipa. Directed 2018 by Natalia Makarova at the Royal Opera House. Stars Marianela Nuñez (Nikiya); Vadim Muntagirov (Solor); Natalia Osipova (Gamzatti); Gary Avis (The High Brahmin); Thomas Whitehead (Rajah); Yuhui Choe, Yasmine Naghdi, Akane Takada, and Artists of the Royal Ballet (The Shades), and Alexander Campbell (The Golden Idol). Boris Gruzin conducts the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House (Concert Master Sergey Levitin). Set design by PIer Luigi Samaritani; costume design by Yolanda Sonnabend; lighting design by John B. Read; staging by Olga Evreinoff; ballet master was Jonathan Howells; ballet mistress was Samantha Raine; assistant ballet mistress was Sian Murphy; principal coaching by Alexander Agadzhanov. Directed for TV by Ross MacGibbon; music produced by Sebastien Chonion. Released 2020, disc has 4.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: D
This is the same production that the ROB published in 2011. Nine years later the only major role repeated was Gary Avis as the High Priest, and there are maybe 3 corps dancers credited in both titles. Nuñez was the bad girl in 2011 and she’s the good girl in 2020. All the other roles have new dancers. We continue to think that the ROB and Opus Arte make repeats like this mostly to give their new star dancers a chance to be seen on TV and in the homes of fans.
I just finished watching this ROB 2020 Bayadère on my 65” OLED display. It’s exactly like the 2011 show with minor improvements in lighting and special effects. I think video resolution is slightly better in 2020 than before. But a strange motion blur problem pops up in the 2020 version. A reader sent me the disturbing images shown below when he displayed the 2020 Bayadère with his projector. He also send me his disc. On my OLED, there was one clip where the motion blur was a bad as what you see below and other places where I saw lesser but distinct motion blur. Under marketing conditions with everything being done by computers with far-away companies, what do you do if a disc has a problem? As a practical matter, you have little or no recourse. In the case of this ROB 2020 Bayadère, however, there is an easy answer: just buy the 2011 version. (The reader with the projector has stopped buying any Opus Arte products for the present because he thinks that Opus Arte may have a quality-control problem.)
If you have had experience with motion blur while showing this 2020 Bayadère, we would love to hear from you.
Now if this title were something new from the Royal Ballet and Opus Arte, I would maybe give it a pretty decent grade. But I continue to prefer the 2011 version because it starred Tamara Rojo as Nikiya. Rojo was (still is maybe) the most beautiful and brainy female dancer of our time, and Nikiya is the bayadère that this ballet is about. (Please don’t tell Osipova what I just wrote.)
It follows as discussed above that if you want a ROB Bayadère, just buy the older version, especially if you have a projector. if you have some special reason to want the 2020 version, buy it and you probably will not be too disturbed by the motion artifacts. That means we give this a D. By the way, the Bolshoi Bayadère is probably the one you should consider first!
And here are two official trailers from the Royal Opera House:
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