“Anna Karenina”
Ballet of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre
Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre
Moscow, Russia
September 05, 2026 (evening performance)
by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2026 by Ilona Landgraf
Over the past twenty years, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has become increasingly popular among choreographers. In 2011, the Mariinsky Ballet toured Alexei Ratmansky’s 2004 adaptation to Baden-Baden. It told the story in retrospect, beginning with the heroine’s suicide, and it revolved primarily around her. I only remember Anna’s red dress, trains, and a lot of steam. Christian Spuck’s 2014 version for Zurich Ballet tried to retell the story in jam-packed, hectically changing scenes while wasting time on insignificant aspects. In John Neumeier’s 2017 ballet, Vronsky was a fancy lacrosse player, and the story was infused with sentimentality (I well remember its bare-chested Levin with a cowboy hat, sitting on a stack of straw next to an old farm tractor with his arms enthusiastically stretched toward a full moon and accompanied by Cat Stevens’s Moonshadow). Continue reading “Focused”