Marianna Ryzhkina, principal ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, will be a guest artist with Metropolitan Classical Ballet Saturday in Bass Performance Hall. She will appear in the Paquita Grand Pas partnered by company regular Andrey Prikhodko. The ballet will be staged by company co-director Alexander Vetrov, a retired Bolshoi principal who often appeared in the work in Russia.
The program will also include Leonid Lavrovsky’s ’60s-era ballet Paganini, a psychological study of the legendary violinist that Vetrov made his own in Moscow. The only non-Russian principal of the evening, Shea Johnson, will dance the title role, with Marina Goshko as his partner. The ballet is set to Rachmaninoff’s popular Variations on a Theme by Paganini for Piano and Orchestra, played here by Gleb Ivanov and accompanied by the Metropolitan Classical Ballet Orchestra led by Ron Spigelman.
In between the Russian works will be co-director Paul Mejia’s Webern Pieces, a work he created in 1986 for the Chicago City Ballet when he was co-director there with Maria Tallchief. Olga Pavlova and Yevgeni Anfinogenov will dance the principal roles.
Sat at 8pm at Bass Performance Hall, 555 Commerce St, FW. Tickets are $10-38. Call 817-212-4280.
