Le Lac des Cygnes at Rockhal

Le Lac des Cygnes comes to the Rockhal Main Hall on Sunday 7 March 2027. Doors at 14:30.

The Paris Ballet Theater dance Swan Lake with a live orchestra. It is the most performed ballet there is, and hearing the score played in the room changes how the familiar bits land.

Seated, and an afternoon start. A December and March pair of ballet dates in a room best known for metal is one of the odder things about the Rockhal calendar, and one of the better ones.

The work: Swan Lake

Swan Lake is one of the great classical ballets, set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He received the commission in 1875, and the ballet premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on 4 March 1877, choreographed by Julius Reisinger. The version that shaped the ballet as we know it came in 1895 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, with choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov.

A nice coincidence: this Belval matinee falls three days after the 150th anniversary of that first night in Moscow.

The story and the moments to watch for

Prince Siegfried falls in love with Princess Odette, cursed by the sorcerer Rothbart to be a swan by day and a woman only at night. It is now common for one ballerina to dance both Odette and Odile, as Pelageya Karpakova already did at the 1877 premiere.

• The Dance of the Little Swans, one of the most famous passages in all ballet music.
• The great pas de deux between Siegfried and Odette.
• The Black Swan pas de deux, which grew out of a duet in Tchaikovsky’s original score.

This production

The 2027 production is danced by the Paris Ballet Theater with a live orchestra. It follows the 1895 Petipa choreography and tours France and Europe with new sets and costumes.