Moldova National Opera Ballet

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The National Ballet of Moldova is housed, together with the National Opera, in a theatre building on the Boulevard Stefan the Great, main road in Chişinău (pronounced Kishinau), the capital of Moldova. Built during the years of the Soviet Union, the theatre has superb equipment and facilities; and it has established itself as one of the leading ballet companies in Eastern Europe. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this theatre was one of the few to retain its own ballet, opera and orchestra, with its own soloists and chorus.

Professional ballet began in Chişinău in 1957, after a group of Moldovan dancers trained in St Petersburg. New works were soon provided for the company: the Moldovan composer Vasile Zagorsky wrote the ballet Rassvet (sunrise), while another composer Eduard Lazarev wrote Broken Sword, based on poem Ghosts, by the man regarded as Moldova’s leading writer Mihai Eminescu.

In its first ten years, the company added many well-known classical ballets to its repertoire, including Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty, Spartacus and Coppelia. It toured to Moscow, Kiev and Bulgaria. The most successful of the company’s modern ballet productions was A Yong Lady and a Hooligan, based on Shostakovitch’s music, in which the lead dancer was Mihai Caftanat, who is still today working with the company. Born in Chişinău, Caftanat studied ballet in Moscow, returning to his native city to dance Siegfried, Prince Desire, Arald in Broken Sword and Anthony in Anthony and Cleopatra.

Other notable productions at this time were: the Carmen Suite; Sonnets, using Benjamin Britten’s music; the Arabesques, with Lazarev’s music. Attempts to create national works included the children’s ballet Andriesh and Luceafarul, based on Eminescu’s best-known poem; while O Seara de Balet re-introduced audiences to the classical choreography of Petipa, Ivanov, Fokin and Gorski. The Kirov Ballet production of La Bayadere was carefully re-created by Tatiana Leagt and showed how well the company could handle a difficult work requiring first-class performers.

In 1998, the legendary choreographer Yuri Grigorovich from the Bolshoi came to Chişinău to direct his version of The Nutcracker, originally played at the Bolshoi in 1966. The company now toured to Moscow, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Paris, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Los Angeles. In 1999 it brought productions of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty to the UK. Since 2001 the company performed Grigorovich’s Nutcracker several times in the UK. This was the first time the production had been seen in this country since the Bolshoi performed it in London in the early seventies. The Moldova National Ballett tours regularly in Spain since 2005, in January 2007 it performs with "The Best of Tchaikovsky" in Spain and northern Germany.