Le Corsaire ballet. Choreographed by Anna-Marie Holmes after Marius Petipa and Konstantin Sergeyev. Music by Adolphe Adam, Cesare Pugni, Léo Delibes, Riccardo Drigo, and Peter von Oldenburg—all orchestrated by Kevin Galiè. Staged 2018 at La Scala. Stars Nicoletta Manni (Medora); Martina Arduino (Gulnare); Timofej Andrijashenko (Conrad); Marco Agostino (Lankendem); Antonino Sutera (Birbanto); Mattia Semberboni (Ali, the slave); Antonella Albano (Zulmea); Virna Toppi, Maria Celeste Losa, and Alessandra Vassallo (Three Odalisques); Alessandro Grillo (Pasha); Emanuela Montanari, Mariafrancesca Garritano, Christian Fagetti, and Massimo Garon (Two Corsair couples); as well as dancers from the Ballet Company of Teatro alla Scala and the Ballet Academy Teatro alla Scala. Patrick Fournillier conducts the Orchestra of Teatro alla Scala. Assistant to the choreographer was Natalia Akhmarova; sets and costumes by Luisa Spinatelli with assistant Monia Torchia; lighting by Marco Filibeck. Directed for TV by Arnalda Canali. Released 2021, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: B+
Le Coursaire is not considered a great ballet, but it’s popular because it has a fun story with lots of action and tons of characters and opportunities to get everybody in the corps out on the stage. And there are lots of slave girls and concubines for the men in the audience to ogle. Set designer Spinatelli creates a realistic and luminous port set for Act 1 below, but I could never quite figure out rugged cliff to your left and the mysterious port and market to the right relate to each other. Center is Marco Agostino as Lankendem, chief of a band of slave traders, with his men. Behind him is a bunch of girls they kidnapped from some village to sell as slaves:
The prettiest captive girl in inventory is Medora (Nicoletta Manni):
Now below we meet the leading man, Conrad (Timofej Andrijashenko), captain of the pirates or buccaneers. The pirates trade mostly in things you can rob from ships, but they also will keep slaves as investments. Conrad has his eye on Medora:
Conrad wants to buy Medora’s freedom to marry her, but Lankendem is sure the Pasha (Alessandro Grillo) can pay much more to get Medora for his harem. So that’s the subject of this ballet: who gets Medora?
The Pasha wins the auction. But later Conrad ambushes the Pasha and grabs Medora and all but one the other new slave girls. In the next three screenshots below, we are at the pirates den where we meet the bare-chested Ali, Conrad’s man slave (Mattia Semperboni). Semperboni is the most accomplished thief of all since he steals the show with his brilliant technique and the help of a bunch of screaming fans in the audience:
Conrad still wants to marry Medora, settle down, and raise beautiful children. Medora agrees, but only if Conrad will release the other captives girls back to their families. When Conrad says OK, the rest of the pirates mutiny. They are led by Bribanto (Antonino Sutero) shown on the floor below after Conrad puts down the revolt, at least for now. The rest of the pirates want to keep the new girls, or at least sell them:
Now things really get complicated as Conrad and Bribanto continue their struggle while Lankendem also maneuvers to retrieve Medora and the girls (and and finally collect their purchase price from the Pasha). Below Bribanto uses a potion to put Conrad to sleep:
The Pasha already has enough wives:
But in an amazingly beautiful scene, the old guy dreams of even more:
Lots of girls from the ballet school get into this scene:
The second most important female role in this show is that of Gulnare (Martina Arduino). She was Medora’s best friend and the only slave girl that Conrad failed to rescue in the ambush. But now she is the Pasha’s favorite wife:
For a moment, Medina and Gulnare are reunited. I guess they are scheduled to become co-favorite wives in the harem:
But soon chaos breaks out in the Pasha palace as Conrad sets Medora free and they flee together in Conrad’s boat to live happily for ever after:
It’s May 2021. We now have 3 other HDVDs of Le Corsaire. Only one of these is from a major company and graded A: the Wiener Staatsoper Ballet production. How does subject title from La Scale compare? Well, the La Scala Ballet is a major company with a huge number of great dancers. The music, sets, costumes, and dancing are comparable to the Wiener Staatsoper show. The La Scala sound quality is excellent.
But there are issues with the video from Arnalda Canali. PQ is generally very good, but not immaculate. For example, in the last screenshot above, a scrim mars the view. There are also at least two instances in the video file, as shown below, where it is readily noticeable that no camera has the dancers in focus!
Brief PQ errors like the 3 above, although hard to accept in a recording of a La Scala show, might be overlooked. But there is a far graver problem in the Canali shoot: weak video content. We ran the numbers on this and filed out a Ballet Wonk Worksheet. The average video clip in Canali’s file lasts only 7.2 seconds. The average video clip in the Roussillon file made in Wien last twice as long at 14.3 seconds. Canali only gets whole-body shots of the dancers in 63% of the video segments. Roussillon gets whole-body shots 82% of the time. Diagnosis: this Canali take suffers from the dread disease of DVDitis.
We start with A+ for the wonderful production from La Scala. For DVDitis, we deduct our grade to B+, and we reduce the grade to B for PQ errors. But considering the investment La Scala made in this production, we move the nudge the grade back up to B+. Too bad. This show is just as good as the one from Vienna—but weak video drags this product down.
Here’s a clip from the C Major:
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