Libretto
Jules Henri de Saint-Georges, Marius Petipa, ed. Pierre Lacotte after the story by Théophile Gautier Le roman de la momie

Music
Cesare Pugni

Performers
Aspicia : Svetlana Zakharova
Taor : Sergey Filin
Passiphonte : Gennady Yanin
Ramze : Maria Aleksandrova

Bolshoi Ballet

Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra
Alexander Sotnikov (conductor)

Cesare Pugni (1802-1870) wasn't known as a great musical pioneer - indeed, he wasn't averse to 'borrowing' other composer's ideas - but his charming ballet music has many of the best qualities of the 19th-century style.

La fille du pharaon was the first great ballet by seminal choreographer Marius Petipa, created in 1862 at St Petersburg to Pugni's score. It is set in Egypt where an English tourist and his servant shelter from a storm inside a pyramid containing the tomb of Aspicia, the Pharaoh's daughter. Lord Wilson smokes opium and falls asleep. In his imagination the beautiful Aspicia leaves her sarcophagus and transforms him into an Egyptian from a bygone era. There he has a wild adventure with the Pharaoh's daughter in order to obtain the hand of his beloved - until his inevitable rude awakening, presumably to a cacophony of souvenir-sellers and chaps trying to flog him a cheap hotel room.

PIerre Lacotte, the outstanding French choreographer, edited the ballet into the version we enjoy here. He shortened and reshaped the original, for instance reintroducing a solo for Aspicia's slave. Lacotte's research was not straightforward - the last interpreter of the ballet, Marina Semionova, danced it in 1926: she was still alive when Lacotte was working on his rechoreography, but couldn't not remember much about the version she danced. Understandably so, as she did it only twice at the age of 17, and was now 91!

Lacotte brings out the fairytale exoticism of Fille du pharaon, and has the services of one of the great ballet theatres of the world - the Bolshoi, whose men are unsurpassed.