Descripción en Youtube:
The Grand Pas Classique from Petipa's final revival of "Paquita", reconstructed by Alexei Ratmansky and Doug Fullington, with Daria Sukhorukova as Paquita, Matej Urban as Lucien and the variations performed by Nicha Rodboon, Severine Ferrolier, Alisa Scetinina and Zuzanna Zahradnikova.
History
The Grand Pas Classique is the most famous passage from Petipa's revival of "Paquita". It was created by Petipa and Ludwig Minkus in 1881 and was first performed in the world premiere of Petipa's revival on the 9th January 1882 [O.S. 27th December 1881] in Saint Petersburg. Perhaps the most distinguished feature of the Grand Pas is the selection of variations that is always performed. In the first performance, the Grand Pas consisted of seven variations for the likes of Ekaterina Vazem, who danced Paquita, Varvara Nikitina, Anna Johansson and Alexandra Schaposchnikova.
The Grand Pas Classique was first introduced to the west by a troupe of Imperial Ballet dancers led by Nikolai Legat, Alexander Shiryaev and Anna Pavlova on a tour of the Baltic States, Scandinavia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany in 1908 and 1909. The tour included an abridgement of the full-length "Paquita" ballet and they famously danced in this abridged staging in Berlin in 1909. Pavlova later included the Grand Pas Classique in her company's repertoire and danced it many times around the world. It was one of the pieces that she performed in her last matinee at the Golders Green Hippodrome in London in 1930 before her death. Among those who attended her last Golders Green matinee was the great Sir Frederick Ashton, who had first seen Pavlova perform in Lima, Peru when he was a teenager.
The variations performed in the reconstruction are the following:
1. Variation for Alexandra Schaposchnikova; music possibly by the composer Vasiliy. Schaposchnikova was the wife of the legendary Premier Danseur Noble Pavel Gerdt and the mother of the great Bolshoi pedagogue Elizaveta Gerdt.
2. Variation for Maria Anderson "L'amour"; music by Riccardo Drigo, originally composed for Maria Gorshenkova's performance in Petipa's grand exotic ballet "Le Roi Candaule". It was later interpolated into Petipa's grand ballet "The Vestal" as a variation for Maria Anderson's performance as Cupid and is known as "L'amour".
3. Variation for Varvara Nikitina; music by the composer Barmin, composed for Nikitina's performance in "Paquita" ca. 1885. This variation later became the Variation of Amour in "Don Quixote" after Alexander Gorsky interpolated it into the "Dream scene" of his 1902 revival.
4. Variation for Ekaterina Vazem; music by Minkus. This is the original variation for Paquita in the Grand Pas Classique composed in 1881.
5. Variation of Lucien; music by Leo Delibes from his ballet "Sylvia". When Petipa and Minkus created the Grand Pas Classique, they did not include a variation for Pavel Gerdt, who danced Lucien. Because of this, Ratmansky and Fullington reconstructed this variation from the Sergeyev
