Andrey Petrov

The Creation of the World

ballet in two acts

Recommended age 12+

Dates

Libretto, choreography and staging: People’s Artist of the USSR and Belarus, laureate of the State Prize of the Republic of Belarus Valentin Elizariev
Musical director: Honoured Art Worker of the Republic of Belarus Vladimir Moshensky
Designer: People’s Artist of Ukraine, laureate of the State Prize of Ukraine Eugene Lysik
Lighting designer: Nina Ivankina
Conductors: Honoured Art Worker of the Republic of Belarus Nikolai Koliadko, Yuri Karavaev 
Chorus masters of the Children’s Musical Theatre Studio: Elena Sokolovskaya, Tatyana Pyshnaya
Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes with one interval
Premiere: 11 April 1976
New version premiere: 8 December 2019

12

“Creation of the World” – is human's handwork and a work of his mind. A human being makes good and evil in the World. And it depends on a person what will rule the World: harmony and light or chaos and dark. Composer Andrew Petrov premised these words to his score.
Together with the composer the choreographer, national artist BSSR, national artist USSR Valentine Elizariev, scenographer Eugene Lisik, conductor L. Lyah and ballet performers appeal to us, break into our existence with eternal and always anxious thoughts about the purpose of human life, about the right for happiness and service for people.
This is not a declaration, not a statement of important theses, but lively, bright, polysemantic figurative reality of the performance. The ballet responds to a crucial problem of the present – protests against threat of war, glorify the might of a human and eternal power of maternity. This significant content is realized in polyphonic interaction of musical– pictorial– choreographic themes of the ballet.
Each of the themes elaborates in aggregate of all expressive possibilities of the performance in the unity of sounding image with its plastic and scenic reality. Originality of the theme, caught up and developed in the dance by choreographer, maintains in polysemantic symbolism of the painting. Sounding of the orchestra, choreography and painting in this performance represent lively and active organic unit where the fundamental principle belongs to the music of Andrew Petrov.
The main task of the creator of the ballet was to look from viewer’s point of view at the anxiety of humanity. From here in the composition of Petrov appears a tendency to epic and civil scale, philosophic, common to all mankind general conclusion and lirycal-psychological profundity.
Thus the composer simply and wisely builds the main themes of the performance. He is unhurried, substantial, laconic. He is able to select the most essential, to consider and show the performance from different sides. Each theme-generalization bears a charge of living credibility, recognition and concrete comparisons. Thus the image of Adam, is gradually extends and being multiplied, becomes the Mankind theme, and it grows in almost symbolical generalisation of Humanity …
Authors of the Minsk performance managed to read in ballet music philosophical and poetic generalisations more considerable, than they were designated in an initial plan of the libretto. Modernity of the performance first of all is in scale of coverage of a theme, in capacity of art generalisation that gives the chance to transfer the past and even to glance in the Mankind future, keeping live communications with warmth of each human heart.
The candidate of art history E.Shumilova
The ballet program

Act I
Chaos
Paradise
Devil
God
Adam
The struggle for Adam
Eve

Act II
Childhood
Hell
Love
People
Running Time
Lamentation of Eve
Rebirth

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